I haven't had any interactions with the maintainer(s), but I absolutely agree with the point on performance from SSH[0]. That said, I do like that Ansible makes no assumptions about your target server's initial state except that it is accessible over SSH (the rest can be bootstrapped from Ansible).
My use case is admittedly much simpler than what Ansible allows for: I use it almost exclusively to provision a host for containers (and then to initialize/start those containers). As a result, my playbooks tend to remain small.
I don't think this use case is realistic for everyone yet, but I think that's the direction we're headed (more containerization), and that it won't be too long before this becomes the norm in devops.
[0] Seriously, the "copy" command is the best illustration of this - thank God that "synchronize" also exists!
It's my belief that as our experience with containers grows, we will quickly out-grow the capabilities of a "RUN and COPY" CM paradigm. At that point, we will fall back to more traditional configuration management tools and create containers out of the results created by those CM tools.
My use case is admittedly much simpler than what Ansible allows for: I use it almost exclusively to provision a host for containers (and then to initialize/start those containers). As a result, my playbooks tend to remain small.
I don't think this use case is realistic for everyone yet, but I think that's the direction we're headed (more containerization), and that it won't be too long before this becomes the norm in devops.
[0] Seriously, the "copy" command is the best illustration of this - thank God that "synchronize" also exists!