D1-I4 Dave Halter - Beautiful Deployment Code

Ignite Talk

We all know that DevOps is not (only) about deploying the latest WordPress anymore. There is a growing number of projects that have huge deployment scripts - think OpenStack or OpenShift. In this context it is extremely important to keep deployment code readable and maintainable.

This talk will not try to give you a best practice overview, but show you how Ansible as a whole could be improved. Ansible has a very rich set of features, its YAML files however are often a stumbling block and understanding a big YAML project is not a task for bystanders. In a simple RFC [1] there is a proposal on how Ansible could look like in the future.

[1] https://github.com/davidhalter/pysible

[2] https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi

Transcript

1. Hi I’m Dave Github: davidhalter Twitter: @jedidjah_ch
2. I work at cloudscale.ch Give us a try. We have awesome cloud servers.
3. I created jedi/jedi-vim Awesome Python Autocompletion/Static Analysis Both have 2.5k stars on github $ pip install jedi
4. I’m not working in DevOps Sorry :)
5. The Zen of Python Beautiful is better than ugly. Simple is better than complex. Readability counts. ...
6. What does ansible well? Modules Group/Host Variables
7. My Problem with Ansible YAML
8. Nobody understands YAML Google: In YAML, how do I break a string over multiple lines?
9. YAML makes things harder String escaping YAML leaves room for interpretation
10. Solutions ahead?! Use Python. YAML is written in Python.
11. from pysible.modules import apt # Make sure nginx is installed apt(name=nginx) An Example
12. Still Declarative from pysible.modules import apt # Make sure nginx is installed apt(name=nginx)
13. Reuse all modules from pysible.modules import apt # Make sure nginx is installed apt(name=nginx)
14. Python is awesome for loops define variables modules/functions
15. Write functions Absorb complexity with functions instead of files
16. from pysible.modules import apt from pysible import context # Make sure nginx is installed with context(delegate_to=”foo”): apt(name=nginx) Context Managers
17. You can use it the same way. It’s still ansible.
18. Can I try it? No.
19. Talk with me about it.
20. We’re hiring! jobs@cloudscale.ch