Config Management Camp 2023 Ghent

Under the hood: how ARA Records Ansible playbooks and makes them easier to understand and troubleshoot
2023-02-07, 14:00–14:50, B.1.017

Proposed as a follow up to FOSDEM 2022's Simple (but useful) Ansible reporting with ara, this presentation goes deeper into the internals of how Ansible and ara works together and what the developer experience looks like.


We'll look at the Ansible callback plugin interface and how ara uses it to record playbooks to local and remote databases without requiring a server.
We'll find out about ara's CLI and API and how they can be used to integrate playbook results into your scripts, tools and monitoring.

Finally, we'll talk about how ara's developer experience was designed to be simple and straightforward for new contributors to get started.

In this presentation with live demos, you can expect to learn about:

  • The different kinds of Ansible plugins and how to leverage them for your own use cases
  • How the different components in ara work together
  • How to use ara's CLI and API to integrate results in your own tools and workflows
  • Opportunities to contribute to ara to make it even better
See also: Slides (pdf)

David is an open source enthusiast and contributor to projects like OpenStack, Ansible, Fedora and CentOS.

iWeb, Ubisoft and RedHat alumni doing bare metal and clouds, Dev/Ops, SRE, CI/CD and everything in between.

He likes simplicity and makes things work.

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