Presented by

  • Daryl Tester

    Daryl Tester

    If Daryl had a dollar for every time he dived into code to see why a product’s documented behaviour deviated from its actual behaviour, he’d be able to retire (once the cost of living drops to a couple of dollars a week). Until then, he shall continue to refer to himself in the third person.

Abstract

Ansible is a popular open source tool used for automating repeatable tasks on (primarily) servers, such as configuration management and software deployment. But, with apologies to my current and future employers, boy, does it irk and vex me (that’s okay, they pay me for my vexability and irkiness). It appears that instead of getting wisdom with age, I got crankier, and spending more time fighting the tool instead of solving the problem at hand just “angries up the blood”. As is typical for me, I thought long and hard about the problem space and possible solutions, weighed up the pros and cons, then went “nuts to this” and <insert favourite search engine>’d for “Ansible alternatives” (“#13 may surprise you!”). As is also typical for me, the one I ultimately picked rarely appears on these lists - pyinfra (https://pyinfra.com), whose maxim is “Think Ansible but Python instead of YAML, and a lot faster”. Come follow me on my journey of discovery as I raise the profile of this open source tool in a talk that my therapist recommended would do me a world of good, or at least get me out of their office because I hadn’t made an appointment.