playbooks

I'm excited to announce I'll be presenting the session Make your Ansible Playbooks Flexible, Maintainable, and Stable at AnsibleFest Austin in the first week of October.

I've spent a lot of time building, maintaining, and in a few cases, completely restructuring Ansible playbooks over the past five years. I hope to distill a lot of the lessons I've learned into this presentation, and I hope anyone else who is as passionate about infrastructure automation as I am can get a lot out of it.

As usual, I'll post slides—and hopefully video as well—from the presentation after it's over. Hope to see you in Austin!

Today while I was running a particularly large Ansible playbook about the 15th time in a row, I was wondering why this playbook seemed to run quite a bit slower than most other playbooks, even though I was managing a server that was in the same datacenter as most of my other infrastructure.

I have had pipelining = True in my system /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg for ages, and initially wondered why the individual tasks were so delayed—even when doing something like running three lineinfile tasks on one config file. The only major difference in this slow playbook's configuration was that I had a local ansible.cfg file in the playbook, to override my global roles_path (I wanted the specific role versions for this playbook to be managed and stored local to the playbook).

So, my curiosity led me to a more thorough reading of Ansible's configuration documentation, specifically a section talking about Ansible configuration file precedence: