Timothy Appnel

Ansible fits naturally into any Kubernetes environment. Both are very active and widely used open source projects with vibrant communities that help make hard things easier.

This talk will demonstrate how Ansible along with its built-in templating and k8s module can be used instead of static YAML definitions that are manually applied using kubectl for rapid, repeatable and consistent multi-cluster deployments.

Further, Ansible makes it easier to deploy and manage the complete lifecycle of complex Kubernetes applications. Traditionally, Operators have been written in Go and require expertise with the internals of Kubernetes. Ansible is also a first class citizen of the Operator SDK that provides an alternative to using Go with a lower barrier to entry. It frees up application engineers, maximizes time to automate and orchestrate your applications, and doing it across new & existing platforms with one simple language.

An Operator is a method of packaging, deploying and automating the complete lifecycle management activities of a Kubernetes application.

While powerful, Operators are usually written in Go by software developers that have a deep understanding of how to write K8s controllers using advanced libraries and patterns.

Enter Ansible.

Ansible is a first class citizen in the Operator SDK providing a means of automating the deployment and management of Kubernetes applications on a cluster in an Ansible-native way. Ansible-based Operators provide a lower barrier to entry, faster iterations and the power of Ansible and its ecosystem. Combining Ansible and Kubernetes frees up application engineers to minimize the new skill sets required to maximize time to delivery. Furthermore, using the same tried and trusted Ansible tooling lets you automate and orchestrate your applications across both new and existing platforms allowing with one simple language.

In this talk we demonstrate how.

Ansible is a simple, powerful and agentless automation tool has accomplished a lot since February 2012 when the first commit was made. Here we will review the architectural and community factors that contributed to its accomplishments and the challenges that it must now address. Tim will cover how Ansible is being evolved over the coming years into a platform and then demo some of the new features that have begun to emerge in recent releases.

This presentation is a follow-up to Ansible Best Practices: The Essentials. It will delve into the topics of developing roles and modules to extended the power of Ansible automation while maintaining readability and simplicity. Based on actual experiences helping Ansible users, we'll show you what to do, and what not to do, to create this most reliable, resilient, and easy-to-manage automation solutions.