The Ultimate Configuration Management Tool? Lessons from a Mixed Methods Study of Ansible's Challenges
For practitioners and tool designers of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools, this work provides actionable insights to address real-world usability and performance issues, though it is incremental in nature.
This study identifies and categorizes challenges faced by Ansible practitioners through analysis of 59,157 online posts and 20 interviews, proposing improvements such as better failure locality, clearer language/templating boundaries, targeted documentation, and improved execution backends.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools have transformed the way IT infrastructure is automated and managed, but their growing adoption has also exposed numerous challenges for practitioners. In this paper, we investigate these challenges through the lens of Ansible, a popular IaC tool. Using a mixed methods approach, we investigate challenges faced by practitioners. We analyze 59,157 posts from Stack Overflow, Reddit, and the Ansible Forum to identify common pain points, complemented by 20 semi-structured interviews with practitioners of varying expertise levels. Based on our findings, we highlight key directions for improving Ansible, with implications for other IaC technologies, including stronger failure locality to support debugging, clearer separation of language and templating boundaries, targeted documentation, and improved execution backends to address performance issues. By grounding these insights in the real-world struggles of Ansible users, this study provides actionable guidance for tool designers and for the broader IaC community, and contributes to a deeper understanding of the trade-offs inherent in IaC tools.