Pulling the Puppet Strings with Ansible

Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - 9:00 am9:45 am

Brian J. Atkisson, Red Hat, Inc.

Abstract: 

Red Hat IT (RHIT) has invested heavily in configuration management for nearly 20 years. Over this time, the configuration management landscape and strategies have substantially evolved. After standardizing on open source Puppet in 2008, we found ourselves with 500,000 lines of manifest code and tens of thousands of template files a decade later. We also were tied to a platform that no longer solved today's challenges.

Ansible has proven to be a simple and robust tool for managing all aspects of modern environments. Application and systems teams were originally attracted to Ansible's natural and prescriptive language. We found it also easily handled hybrid cloud and application orchestration, in addition to traditional configuration management functions. This drove RHIT to begin adopting Ansible across the board.

In this session, we shall discuss our Ansible migration experience and strategy going forward, including the use of tools like AWX (Tower) and Galaxy.

Brian J. Atkisson, Red Hat, Inc.

Brian J. Atkisson has 20 years of production systems engineering and operations experience, focusing primarily on identity management and hybrid infrastructure solutions. He has worked in these roles for the University of California, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Red Hat, Inc. He is a Red Hat Certified Architect and Engineer, in addition to holding many other certifications and a B.S. in Microbiology. He currently is the Infrastructure Architect for Red Hat IT.

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BibTeX
@conference {240804,
author = {Brian J. Atkisson},
title = {Pulling the Puppet Strings with Ansible},
year = {2019},
address = {Portland, OR},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}

Presentation Video