I've tried Ansible and Puppet, but I just never could get used to them or like them. I like the shell provisioner because I know EXACTLY what it's doing. I can provision a server myself, I have the knowledge and understanding to. I can type up the commands in a bash script to provision it faster than I could learn exactly what Ansible or Puppet or Chef are doing when I tell it to install Nginx.
I get completely where you are coming from, the reason that I eventually got the hang of Ansible is because if you do it right (I mean using ansible's modules over scripts/commands) it adds the ability to rerun your ansible playbooks (think of them like those bash scripts) multiple times on the same cluster/node/server without worrying something will change because you run them more than once. Also bash on it's own has no templating feature, or easy way to check if something has already happend. And after a while the whole systems starts making sense.
I can only imagine your current bash-scripts are awesome and do tons of stuff for you, but I'd really like to suggest you give ansible another go, and ignore the different files for roles/vars/tasks in the beginning, just dump everything into one playbook, like your bash scripts do currently.
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An idempotent provisioner would be a better option. Ansible is my favorite.
I've tried Ansible and Puppet, but I just never could get used to them or like them. I like the shell provisioner because I know EXACTLY what it's doing. I can provision a server myself, I have the knowledge and understanding to. I can type up the commands in a bash script to provision it faster than I could learn exactly what Ansible or Puppet or Chef are doing when I tell it to install Nginx.
I get completely where you are coming from, the reason that I eventually got the hang of Ansible is because if you do it right (I mean using ansible's modules over scripts/commands) it adds the ability to rerun your ansible playbooks (think of them like those bash scripts) multiple times on the same cluster/node/server without worrying something will change because you run them more than once. Also bash on it's own has no templating feature, or easy way to check if something has already happend. And after a while the whole systems starts making sense.
I can only imagine your current bash-scripts are awesome and do tons of stuff for you, but I'd really like to suggest you give ansible another go, and ignore the different files for roles/vars/tasks in the beginning, just dump everything into one playbook, like your bash scripts do currently.
I've made that too: https://github.com/vagrant-ops/vagrantops (although work in progress, and I have some sneaky/evil/delicious plans for it)