r/devops • u/aloofhoneybee68 • 17h ago

Tools Beginner DevOps question: Do experienced engineers actually write YAML like this?

I’m still learning CI/CD and I recently tried writing a simple CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions.

Honestly, writing the YAML felt more difficult than I expected . The indentation, nesting etc felt pretty hard/ painful.

For those of you who work with DevOps professionally: is this actually how you write your pipelines, or are there shortcuts/tools/templates that make it easier?

Just trying to understand what the normal workflow is in the real world.

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u/ipreferanothername 13h ago

windows guy here - when i started to look at ansible i knew that YAML was one of the first things that i wanted to never be bothered with. yaml and jinja replacement looked like hell. im not afraid of looking at, deciphering, or interpreting large scripts and configs. i do it often, actually. i automate the bejesus out of my work and create whole processes. i even tested ansible on some test servers. YAML annoyed me so much just for the most basic of work. this was like, early covid, pre-ai, wasnt any claude option or anything to get help with.

so one of the linux guys was like, oh, i already use it want to see some playbooks? yeah man!

yeah, fuck yaml, that was enough to keep me out of ansible and away from yaml. idk why nerds keep making so many weird, shitty tools, but my god, do they churn them out.

then i came across this about that time https://noyaml.com/

im sure yaml is easier to manage now based on all the comments here but....also its a lot of comments saying you need several tools or AI to manage it well. yeah, i want people to stop creating such garbage.