They installed it for us at work as part of a project, and we went to ask the ansible guy wtf we could use it for in a windows world, and he couldn’t articulate how it would be an improvement in any way over a scheduled task.
It appeals to me for management of a windows machine for a few things:
Lots of machines at once, over winrm. Although ssh is the default, as ansible is linux first.
I don’t have to learn powershell - the shared language means the windows teams and the linux team don’t have to learn eachother’s language. In ansible, it’s very easy to avoid the footguns that come with something like bash, especially after you install the red hat linter, ansible-lint, which warns of ansible’s own footguns.
easy to version control it
premade stuff: the official “modules” are massive and do a lot. There are also community packages: https://galaxy.ansible.com - of course, you should probably check any stuff you run first. But ansible is very easy to read.
built in secret management. Encrypt secrets, but still be able to use them smoothly with the automation framework.
For just one machine? Task scheduler is probably good enough. 2-3 machines, managed remotely? Ansible is at least worth looking at.
The examples are very helpful, with things like getting a list of ad users. I used that to create a ansible script to shuffle all ad user passwords - while being a a linux lover who hates windows and has literally never touched ad before this.
They installed it for us at work as part of a project, and we went to ask the ansible guy wtf we could use it for in a windows world, and he couldn’t articulate how it would be an improvement in any way over a scheduled task.
To be fair it is not Ansible’s fault that Windows does pretty much everything differently from the systems Ansible was designed for.
Agreed entirely.
It appeals to me for management of a windows machine for a few things:
For just one machine? Task scheduler is probably good enough. 2-3 machines, managed remotely? Ansible is at least worth looking at.
Edit: also, really good docs. Like, check out this active directory module with examples: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/microsoft/ad/object_info_module.html#ansible-collections-microsoft-ad-object-info-module
The examples are very helpful, with things like getting a list of ad users. I used that to create a ansible script to shuffle all ad user passwords - while being a a linux lover who hates windows and has literally never touched ad before this.
https://github.com/CSUN-CCDC/CCDC-2023/blob/main/windows/ansible/testing/users.yml
https://github.com/CSUN-CCDC/CCDC-2023/blob/main/windows/ansible/roles/domain/tasks/main.yml
Nice, I love it