Sorry for the clickbaity title. I thought I’d try clickbait for once. But let me make it up to you by giving you the TL;DR.
Ansible used to be THE tool, now it’s just A tool. A good one, but nowadays there is so much more. So if you rely on Ansible as the only tool, you are missing out.
Ansible was a bit of a revolution in the sysadmin world. Not that it was the first tool for configuration management - Puppet was there earlier, and others were even before that - but Ansible had the capability to work via SSH. Puppet needed an agent and an additional network connection. So you had to ask for permission from the firewall admins and had to go through all the hoops that adding a new tool required.
But Ansible didn’t need all of that. You could just install it on your notebook and let it use the SSH connection you had anyway. No need to change the existing system just for the tool. It also wasn’t an all-or-nothing tool. You could use it to automate some tasks while doing everything else just like you did before.
That probably helped its acceptance and transformed the type of work sysadmins did. Instead of logging into systems, changing things manually, and updating the documentation, you wrote an Ansible playbook which did the changes for you and, due to the YAML structure of the config files, was mostly self-documenting.
So, for quite some time, Ansible was THE tool. You manually created the server,
either by physically adding it to the data center or by creating a VM. After
that, you installed the OS with the help of some tools like Kickstart, but
those were rather rudimentary. Once the OS was running, you could start
ansible-playbook and watch the screen yellow from all the changed messages
that Ansible produced when it, well, changed something on the system. Run it
another time and now enjoy all the green OK messages when Ansible noticed
that the system was as it should be. Good times!
But times are changing, and so did the tools. VMs became more and more common, and the various cloud providers and their ever-improving APIs made more detailed VM setups possible. Docker made VMs look bloated, and while actually going to the data center was already a thing of the past, the new tools made SSH-ing into a server something you only did if things went wrong.
That might all sound a bit nostalgic, but it’s not. The new world has good things: precision, repeatability, and interconnected tools. Automation that actually deserves its name. While Ansible caused a smirk on the sysadmin’s face, tools like Packer, Terraform, AZ, gcloud, cloud-init, GitHub Actions, and many more paint a big, bright grin on a DevOps engineer’s face.
Oh, and don’t be sad for Ansible. It’s still there, for example, as a provisioner in Packer. They all play along nicely.
So if Ansible is still THE tool for you: Come to the new world, you won’t regret it.