Internal Tech Upgrade Proposal: The Necessity of Modernizing Our Deployment Tools #42
Description
Current State & Bottleneck Analysis: Why Our Existing Ansible Workflow Needs Re-evaluation
Currently, our operations and deployment processes are primarily automated using Ansible. In the initial stages of our projects, Ansible was instrumental in helping us quickly standardize server configurations and achieve the first step of "Infrastructure as Code." However, as application complexity and the diversity of our services have grown, the maintenance costs and efficiency bottlenecks of the current solution have become increasingly prominent:
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Excessively High Playbook Maintenance Costs: Minor requirement changes, such as adding a new environment variable, adjusting an Nginx setting, or updating a dependency, can require modifying multiple YAML files across different roles. These playbooks are becoming increasingly bloated, difficult to read, and hard to debug, leading to a continuous accumulation of technical debt.
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Lack of Transparency in the Deployment Process: When a deployment fails, we have to dig through verbose terminal outputs from Ansible to locate the problem, which is an inefficient process. The entire workflow is like a black box to developers, which is not conducive to fostering a true DevOps culture.
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Limited Iteration Speed: Every deployment, even for a minor code update, requires a full execution of the playbook. This process is relatively slow and fails to meet our demands for rapid iteration and agile development.
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Clunky Containerization Integration: Although Ansible can manage Docker, its handling of multi-container application networking, volume mounting, and service discovery is cumbersome and unintuitive, making it far less efficient than native container management platforms.
Core Objective:
The core objective of this proposed tech upgrade is clear: to free the team's energy from tedious low-level infrastructure maintenance and allow us to return our focus to the development and innovation of the applications themselves. We need a more efficient, intuitive, and automated deployment layer to replace our current high-maintenance Ansible scripts.
To this end, I have conducted preliminary research and evaluation of several modern deployment tools on the market, focusing on the following three solutions that can directly address the aforementioned pain points: Coolify, Dokploy, and Ploi.io.