I'm currently working on automating infrastructure and I'm curious about the real-world usage of static versus dynamic inventory. In my environment, we manage several AWS accounts and different setups. I'm trying to decide if we should stick with static inventory files or shift entirely to dynamic inventory solutions, like those offered by cloud providers.
Could you share your practical experiences on:
- When does it make sense to use static inventory?
- At what scale does dynamic inventory become essential?
- Have you encountered any challenges with dynamic inventory in production environments?
- What's your tagging strategy to ensure reliable dynamic inventory?
I'm more interested in real insights rather than just theory. Thanks!
5 Answers
I've personally seen a lot of success with dynamic inventory, especially in AWS. It fetches the latest data from the cloud which saves me a lot of hassle. I find static inventory manageable only for small setups, but it gets tedious fast since updates are frequent. For someone like me juggling school and projects, dynamic is definitely more efficient.
I believe in starting with the source code. Even though it's technically static, I create everything dynamically which works out best in the long run.
Static inventory is still useful for small environments where servers hardly change. But once you scale to multiple AWS accounts, dynamic inventory is hard to avoid. The key challenge is maintaining strict tagging and naming conventions; otherwise, things can quickly get messy.
I switched everything to dynamic inventory about a year ago. It was tougher than I thought, especially since half of our EC2s didn't have SSM set up. Now, with nearly 100 AWS accounts, dynamic inventory is a must. We manage inventory files in Git. The only downside is dealing with inconsistent tagging in our older accounts which complicates things a bit.
In our setup, we use static inventory for managing on-premise servers while relying on dynamic inventory for cloud servers. It really helps us keep things organized based on the environment.
That makes perfect sense! Static for the stable on-prem environments and dynamic for those ever-changing cloud instances sounds like a solid plan.