Ansible or Jenkins pipelines for bigger jobs

Question

At the moment we are using combination of Jenkins pipelines and Ansible playbooks. Usually we end up with short ansible playbooks that are run either inside of Jenkins pipeline or just as a jenkins job.

What would be be better approach for more complicated, multi-step jobs?

For example one job consists of:

1. Start ec2 instance from AMI
2. Run migrations
3. Pull latest code, compile and restart
4. Create new AMI from temporary instance
5. Terminate temporary instance

I do like the fact that I can handle user input in Jenkins pipelines as well as the graphic representation of every step in the pipeline. In example above each step would be probably its own little ansible playbook. Passing parameters from playbook to playbook isnt that straight forward, but we know how to do it.

I am not 100% sure if I am doing this up to best standard as during creating these pipelines I am thinking that this should probably be ansible and the other way arounnd.

Can anyone tell me how these two can work together?

Answer 1

Well, you are indeed well aware of the limitations that each tool brings to the table,

The sweet spot would be what works the best for you and your company, now, ask yourself which approach would be easier to manage? which one would become too complicated when scaling?

I've done both approaches and found that the pipeline tools from jenkins seem to have the best effect in terms of "readability" and ease of management, this is specially evident when we had the chance to bring new members on the team and they can get a quick overview of the processes just by looking at our pipelines on jenkins,

Now, we have also used a combination of jenkins (just ci) + nexus (artifact management) + octopus (just cd) + ansible (provisioning) to handle everything on complicated pipelines,

Again, ask yourself what would be easier to manage, and what is most likely to grow over time (number of steps on the pipeline, number of pipelines or jobs, number of servers to manage, etc...) and take a decision based on that.

I hope it would help you resolve your query.