I guess I've never really considered playbooks declarative. They are written like and feel like a script I'd write in a language like, I don't know, Python. Now, Salt state files I would consider declarative. They are simply Jinja templated dictionaries (Ansible is YAML that tries to find values templated with Jinja; BIG difference as I've discovered using Ansible for the last 6 months) that actually describe a set of states the host should be in. Ansible's playbooks encode a set of function calls that should be applied in a particular order. Don't get me wrong, playbooks ARE powerful in their ability to describe processes that span multiple hosts and I recognize that, but I'd really like to use a real programming language rather than some half-baked one that is encoded in YAML.
I agree with the GP that I wish the Python API was a bit more robust. Currently we have several tools that generate playbooks on the fly, write them to temporary files and then run them with ansible-playbook to ensure we don't lose some functionality that makes playbooks as powerful as they are. Now, it appears the API has significantly changed in 2.0 and it looks like they expose (read: recommend using) more of it making it easier to script with Ansible.
I guess I've never really considered playbooks declarative. They are written like and feel like a script I'd write in a language like, I don't know, Python. Now, Salt state files I would consider declarative. They are simply Jinja templated dictionaries (Ansible is YAML that tries to find values templated with Jinja; BIG difference as I've discovered using Ansible for the last 6 months) that actually describe a set of states the host should be in. Ansible's playbooks encode a set of function calls that should be applied in a particular order. Don't get me wrong, playbooks ARE powerful in their ability to describe processes that span multiple hosts and I recognize that, but I'd really like to use a real programming language rather than some half-baked one that is encoded in YAML.
I agree with the GP that I wish the Python API was a bit more robust. Currently we have several tools that generate playbooks on the fly, write them to temporary files and then run them with ansible-playbook to ensure we don't lose some functionality that makes playbooks as powerful as they are. Now, it appears the API has significantly changed in 2.0 and it looks like they expose (read: recommend using) more of it making it easier to script with Ansible.