It may be hard to image, but some sysadmins do not operate in ideal, tightly controlled circumstances. Apparently, not every developer, application or organization is ready for Kubernetes…

In this presentation we will share a real world use case: deploying and configuring a brand new natural history museum. We’ll show how we built the museum with open source software and config management tools, dealing with a broad set of technologies, a tight schedule, a sector dominated by traditional organizations fixated on proprietary solutions and a whole bunch of actual fossils. We’ll show how far we’ve come, and what choices we made along the way.

Specifically, in this talk we will showcase in detail some of the automation code we developed in the process. For example, we will elaborate on the way how we use Ansible and AWX to configure switchports, (re)deploy computers from scratch with MAAS, configure those computers with the relevant role and provision relevant content, all in one automated workflow.