Cfgmgmtcamp 2025: Sorin Sbarnea - Using Ansible Development Tools for Robust Automation Content

Beyond copy-paste: Using Ansible Development Tools for Robust Automation
2025-02-03, 14:50–15:40, Ansible 2 (B.1.014)

As we all know, infrastructure automation has evolved beyond simple scripting, yet many organizations still rely on copying and pasting tasks from online sources into Ansible playbooks. While it seems expedient and "works on my machine", this approach introduces technical debt, reduces maintainability, and increases security risks. This session will demonstrate how Ansible Development Tools provide an intuitive and integrated experience for authoring automation content as an alternative to ad-hoc practices with disconnected tooling.

During this talk, we'll take a look at tools like the VSCode extension, ansible-creator, ansible-lint, and navigator, as well as Ansible development environments. We'll examine how automation developers can seamlessly author reliable, idempotent playbooks that are tested, validated, and documented. We'll also show how to use the same tools and practices to generate, test, and build Ansible collections to distribute and share your automation content.

By embracing Ansible development tools, organizations can avoid playbooks that increase the risk of deployment failure and move towards robust automation content that has predictable results, scales reliably across environments, and gives teams confidence to rapidly iterate and roll out improvements in production environments.

Part 1: Streamlining the Ansible creator experience with the new and improved Ansible Development tools
Part 2: How to write Ansible Content THIS TALK
Part 3: Beyond copy-paste: Using Ansible Development Tools for Robust Automation Content


Sorin Sbarnea

Principal Software Engineer @ Red Hat
Ansible DevTools Team Lead