AnsibleFest2018 (Austin, Texas)

So, it’s been such a good week! Dennis, Marco, Jonathan and I (and 1300 other Ansible fans) visited Ansible Fest 2018.

Good to meet you

After working with quite some people online, I was really happy to finally meet some Ansible heroes:

• Jeff Geerling - Ansible god, what a nice person.
• David Moreau Simard - Creator of Ara and a real pleasure to speak to.
• Chris Houseknecht - Galaxy contributor.
• Victor da Costa - Ansible network fan.
• John Barker - Ansible community promotor.

Highlights

Although nearly each talk was valuable, these are some (randomly ordered) takeaways that influence me:

• Jeff Geerling recommends to include -Purpose-, -Links- and -Test instructions- t each README.md of a role.
• Mazer will be used to package role and send them off to Galaxy. It’s not production ready now though.
• Jeff Geerling recommends to yamllint, --syntax-check and ansible-lint on earch commit, also molecule test and ansible-playbook --check will improve quality.
• Molecule will be much more integrated into the Ansible codebase.
• Jeff Geerling recomments to use the callback plugins profile_roles, profile_tasks and timer, just as stdout_callback.
• Galaxy will work on GitLab (and likely any Git provider) integration.
• Galaxy will introduce code quality rating. Each role will be tested for Ansible Lint rules. Warnings and errors will reduce the amount of stars assigned. You can see this behaviour on the Development Galaxy for one of my roles.
• Jeff Geerling recommends to use “flat” variables. Consider these two examples:

Difficult to overwrite a single value:

apache:
  start_servers: 2
  max_clients: 2

Easy to overwrite:

apache_start_servers: 2
apache_max_clients: 2

All in all, I’m really happy with the direction Ansible is going and feel that most decicions I’ve done in the past year are correct.

I expect that molecule testing will be integrated into Galaxy and reports will be created using ARA will be integrated.