Why is infrastructure automation so hard to maintain?
Legacy RMM and configuration management tools like Ansible feel increasingly outdated, lacking the flexibility, modern API/MCP integrations, and AI-driven capabilities needed for automated drift correction. Engineers get stuck wrestling with rigid playbooks and laggy systems rather than having seamless programmatic control over the entire stack.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Using Terraform exclusively for infrastructure and configuration
- 2Combining Terraform with tools like Puppet or Rudder for drift correction
- 3Limiting Ansible usage strictly to inventory management for periodic console access
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“0% times but I'm sure if I used it 50% it would make my life easier.”source ↗
“My current RMM once felt ahead of the curve but now feels like it's lagging badly. I want flexibility. Api / MCP integrations for aggregated dashboards. AI agent working over secure on demand tunnels to endpoints.. Smart alerting.. Documentation ingestion and self service... Scheduled programmatic control over the client entire stack.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 32Should customer support live inside our CRM?
- 4How to use AI in grant writing without getting flagged
- 2How to manage too many AI automation ideas
- 8Why can't I trust AI agents with production tasks?
- 2ECS vs EKS for teams without cloud experience
- 3Unified tool for zero-touch provisioning and IT asset management