David Moreau-Simard
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 at OVHcloud.
He likes simplicity and makes things work.
Sessions
LLMs can write Ansible roles and playbooks as well as plugins and modules to a relative degree of competency with commodity hardware that you can run offline, at home, with less privacy and security concerns.
They certainly understand what Ansible is, how it works and they can write YAML, Jinja or Python.
What about troubleshooting an issue with an Ansible playbook ?
You could provide it with a log file or copy & paste the results of your ansible-playbook command.
Maybe it could point you in the right direction... or hallucinate. Who knows ? ¯\(ツ)/¯
ARA Records Ansible playbook results to a database and provides an API to query the results.
What if we gave a LLM programmatic access to that API using Model Context Protocol (MCP) ?
It would allow the model to include context like host facts, playbook files and detailed task results, amongst other things.
The author experimented with it (for science) and the results are interesting.
Join us to learn about the experiment, how it works and how it might be useful in a number of ways.
We all have constraints, like budget, time, and resources. Dealing with them through imperfect choices results in technical debt, while learning and better technology creates opportunities for optimizations and refactors.
How can we practice dealing with these things before they cause us significant issues ?
Factory‑sim games (like Factorio, Satisfactory, and many others) might drop us on an alien world with a pickaxe and a deadline: survive long enough to research technology and build supply chains to launch stuff in space.
- Starting from scratch, we'll need to learn what tools and architecture are available to us.
- At first we'll craft things manually like we would with a CLI but that doesn't scale.
- Soon, we start automating with machines (like scripts) and eventually we automate the automators, Ansible or Terraform style.
- Then, entire factories can be packaged with clear inputs and outputs just like containerized applications.
- Before long, these factories are connected by networks of conveyor belts, drones and trains like supply chains in the middle of pipelines.
- We'll need to troubleshoot issues and identify bottlenecks with the help of observability and alerting, too.
- We might even need to defend ourselves and set up security.
Sound familiar ?
These games mirror the skills we need as engineers. In this talk, we'll explore some of these games, in order to show how they provide a fun and safe place to improve our skills in designing & building scalable systems.