[lastofus]

In my experience, Ansible is fantastic for provisioning a machine from bare Linux VM to running service.

OTOH it's quite slow when used for deployments. There's no way you would be getting 5 second deployments with it.

My favorite middle ground between shell scripts and Ansible is Fabric (https://www.fabfile.org/).

[e12e]

Ansible isn't a speed demon, but note that Ansible, like docker over ssh (export DOCKER_HOST=“ssh://user@remotehost) greatly benefits from persisted ssh connections - via ~/.ssh/ssh_config or Ansible config.

https://docs.rackspace.com/blog/speeding-up-ssh-session-crea...

https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/faster-ansible-playbook-exec...

Apparently Docker also let you point at different hosts via "context":

https://docs.docker.com/engine/context/working-with-contexts