Friday after getting finally a mostly good nights sleep and having some hotel breakfast, it was time for the ansible best practices workshop that misc setup. The plan was to work on some infrastructure playbooks that had bitrotted over the years and clean things up so it was a better example of how playbooks should be setup. However, when it came time, it seemed lots of people there didn’t have too much experience with ansible, so instead we spent almost the entire time talking about best practices and how things were setup. We went over the mailman3 playbooks and noted a number of things for cleanup. There was mention of ansible-lint, ansible-report and molicule. So, in the end we didn’t get much fixed, but we did have some good information sharing and education of new folks to ansible.
After a quick lunch, it was time for the Server working group Pow-wow. This session was great, we had a lot of lively discussion from modularity folks, server working group members and other interested parties. We have a bunch of things we now need to follow up on and get more information about:
- if rolekit can easily use or be made to use ansible as it’s backend.
- if not, how easily we can get ansible tied into cockpit
- how easily we can re-write the current server roles as ansible playbooks taking input via rolekit
- how much configuration will be done as part of module profiles
The basic plan is to see if we can’t replace the rolekit backend with ansible and leverage all the ansible knowledge out there to make new roles. If we can use existing rolekit the interface can stay the same and cockpit can continue to talk to it. Modularity work will help us with life cycle and other common problems people run into with servers.
After that session, flock was over for this year. ;( A bunch of us went down to the city center and wandered around and had dinner. Everything was quite tasty and I finally found some dark beer.