Disadvantages of using Ansible Playbooks

Ansible playbooks offer many advantages, there are also some potential disadvantages to be aware of:

• Complexity for Large-Scale Deployments: As Ansible codebase grows and manages larger and more complex entities, the playbooks could start to be more difficult to maintain by and large. It is critical to have a well-structured and modularized design.
• Limited Real-Time Execution Control: Ansible performs tasks in orderly way, and it is hard to alter the order during the process. This, however, implies some disadvantages for others uses that demand more involvement.
• No Built-In Reporting or Dashboarding: Ansible doesn’t have in-built reports and dashboard as provided in the box. You might need to include the third-party tools on your reporting dashboard or create one from scratch for monitoring and reporting.
• No Native Windows Support: Ansible, on the other hand, is able to handle Windows systems but it involves the use of some third-party plugin or commands passing over powershell remoting. This could lead to increase the level of complexity.
• Steep Learning Curve: The Ansible has its own domain-specific language (YAML-based) and notions that could be a bit difficult to grasp by people who are either new to automation in IT or to configuration management.
• Potential Performance Issues: In the case of large-scale deployments by thousands of nodes, Ansible’s performance may be reduced because of its architecture design and the requirement of establishing individual ssh ports to each node.

Ansible empowers you to perform all of these tasks by using playbooks which help to write instructions in files. Let’s imagine the playbook to be similar to a recipe book, except from following the steps on a dish, the computers will be getting those one-step-at-a-time instructions. Each playbook is formed from different plays or like than chapters from a book. Every play below it pinpoints the specific functions that are executed by your computers. These functions can be anything from changing users to installing packages, building directories, modifying configuration files, or running scripts. The Ansible itself is pretty interesting as you can create a playbook and then use this playbook on different computers at a time.