CfgMgmtCamp 2025 Ghent

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.