Please read the tuning article on the blog for sure. It's definitely not slow and we have folks updating 5000 servers in 5 minutes. (Yes, really!) ControlPersist and the like are key, and we'd be happy to help discuss options for you.
As for sequentially, set --forks to control parallelism. Steps are executed in order, but that's true of all CMS systems.
> It's definitely not slow and we have folks updating 5000 servers in 5 minutes. (Yes, really!) ControlPersist and the like are key, and we'd be happy to help discuss options for you.
It's good but I wouldn't describe this as fast, it should be possible to increase the performance by another order of magnitude with some optimisation. Web servers can easily serve 5000 request per second even when SSL is involved, why couldn't Ansible do the same ?
After enabling ControlPersist, the next optimisation is to run Ansible in the same datacenter. Latency is a killer when deploying to us-east-1 from Europe.
> Steps are executed in order, but that's true of all CMS systems.
It's true on a single host (although puppet's and salt's ordering is not guaranteed). Ansible also orders across all the hosts. If you have tasks A->B->C, ansible will first run A on all the hosts and collect the results before moving to the next step. Each step is thus as slow as the slowest execution.
Please read the tuning article on the blog for sure. It's definitely not slow and we have folks updating 5000 servers in 5 minutes. (Yes, really!) ControlPersist and the like are key, and we'd be happy to help discuss options for you.
As for sequentially, set --forks to control parallelism. Steps are executed in order, but that's true of all CMS systems.