One person's Ansible is another's pyinfra.
Have you ever sat there while writing an Ansible playbook and thought to yourself "Gee, I know how to express what I want in in a programming language, such as Python, but this Domain Specific Language bolted on top of Jinja layered on top of YAML is sure getting me down", then this may be the talk for you. Welcome to pyinfra, where your inventories and playbooks look remarkably like Python code, mainly because they are (with some clarification around the "mainly").
In this talk, the presenter (hi!) will show the conversion of one of their Ansible playbooks to pyinfra. Along the way he will show how relatively straightforward it is to write facts and operations (a cornerstone of most orchestration tools) under pyinfra.
See this talk and many more by getting your ticket to PyCon AU now!
I want a ticket!Originally, this journey started as a crisis of faith. I was disheartened by my Ansible playbooks becoming more convoluted as I was introducing more logic into them, and resorting to writing Jinja filters to attempt to simplify and make my playbooks more "readable" (with varying degrees of success). Although not billing itself as a programming language, over time Ansible playbook keywords have acquired the ability to performing selection, looping and even exception handling, which looks pretty languagy to me, and came to the conclusion that if I could write a playbook as a Python program without too much boilerplate, that would be the sweet spot.
So while searching the orchestration tool space (which is typically inhabited by the likes of Ansible, Puppet, Saltstack and friends), I found https://pyinfra.com/. Even though pyinfra is a "newcomer" to this field, its first commit to Github was over 8 years ago, it's on version 2.6.2 (at the time of writing), and its author regularly inflicts production workloads on it and is actively responsive to bug fixes and suggestions. Although my "production workload" these days is much smaller (which is primarily my home lab and VPSes), I find writing playbooks to be a much more straightforward and enjoyable experience, and even debugging has become a lot easier.
"Vell, he's just zis guy, you know?"
Daryl's career has spanned two centuries, if not millennia. He has worked a variety of roles within the IT industry, and one day he may pick one and stick with it. Today, however, is not that day.