The Bullhorn

A Newsletter for the Ansible Developer Community

Welcome to The Bullhorn, our newsletter for the Ansible developer community. If you have any questions or content you’d like to share, please reach out to us at the-bullhorn@redhat.com.
 

VIRTUAL ANSIBLE CONTRIBUTOR SUMMIT

The next Ansible Contributor Summit will be on Monday, July 6th, with hackathon days to follow on the 7th and 8th. Please register on Eventbrite if you plan to attend any part of the event, and add agenda items for potential discussion on the etherpad.

ANSIBLE BIG PR DAYS

The awesome Ansible community contributes lots of pull requests (PRs) every month. Sometimes the volume of incoming PRs can mean contributors having to wait a long time for them to be merged, or even reviewed. We are going to change that by having dedicated PR review days.

• Give potential new community contributors a place to learn and experiment with Ansible's review process

• Improve the process and documentation by getting feedback from you

  • Feedback from people starting their journey with open source is particularly important to us, as it helps to identify and improve processes and documentation that may have evolved over time to become complicated. People that have been contributing for a while have already built up this knowledge and have forgotten what it was like to simply not know how to do something!

• Identify PRs that can be merged or closed

Help PRs that are not covered by one of the existing Ansible Working Groups, and therefore may accidentally fall through the cracks

If you have some time during the day to join us, please feel free to take part or even just listen in.

NEW WEEKLY COMMUNITY MEETING

Based on community feedback, we have regular weekly meetings on Wednesdays at 18:00 UTC in #ansible-collections on Freenode IRC. You can import this URL community.ics to your own calendar if you’d like to receive reminders.

This is a great opportunity to find out about the progress being made towards Ansible 2.10 and specifically moving from the monorepo (github.com/ansible/ansible) to the many Collection repositories.

To see what's been discussed so far, take a look at  https://github.com/ansible/community/issues/539

COMMUNITY DATA ANALYSIS

Greg Sutcliffe, our community data scientist, has a new blog post on the real statistics of community.general and why it pays to properly test your code. It turns out the graph we published in issue #2 was incorrect, and he details what happened, what the real graphs are, and where we're taking this. Here's a teaser:

COMMUNITY CONTENT

Every month we notice the community posting great content. Although not all strictly developer focussed, maybe there’s an article or two here that piques your interest? Let us know if you’d like to see more of this.
 

Make integration tests for your Ansible Collection fast! A story of how Steampunks made Sensu Go Ansible Collection’s test times as short as possible.
 

Serge van Ginderachter has a gist with example code for an inventory plugin.
 

Testing Ansible roles using Molecule and Podman. Ilkka Tengvall is an Ansible Solutions Architect based in Helsinki, Finland. Here he talks through his role testing setup, and even has a short video for your enjoyment too.

Mint Security have written about Installing Splunk with Ansible.
 

Stuart Cunliffe from IBM has a lengthy discussion on Ansible on YouTube. He talks about how it relates to IBM Power Systems and its integration with IBM PowerVC. In this video he demonstrates Ansible modules, playbooks and roles, as well as showing Ansible deploying new PowerVM LPARs.

ANSIBLE VIRTUAL MEETUPS

The following virtual meetups are being held in the Ansible community over the next month:

Ansible Paris Meetup #19

Fri, Jun 12 · 6:30 PM UTC+2

https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-Paris/events/271033303/

Ansible Minneapolis: Self-Service Infrastructure Provisioning in the Cloud

Thu, Jun 18 · 6:30 PM CDT

https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-Minneapolis/events/sbqkgrybcjbxb/

Ansible Toronto June 2020

Fri, Jun 19 · 12:00 PM EDT

https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-Toronto/events/271081384/ 

Ansible India Meetup

Sat, Jun 27 · 10:00 AM UTC+5:30

RSVP with one of the meetup groups “near” you: Bangalore, Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Aurangabad, Chennai, Hyderabad, or Pune! (They will link to the same virtual event.)

Note: For these virtual events, the links to participate will be visible once you RSVP to attend. If you’re interested in the topics presented, you can join from anywhere in the world as long as the time zone and language works for you!

We are planning more virtual meetups to reach a broader audience, and we want to hear from you! Have you started using Ansible recently, or are you a long-time user? How has Ansible improved your workflow or scaled up your automation? What are some of the challenges you’ve faced and lessons learned? Share your experience by presenting at a Virtual Ansible Meetup: https://forms.gle/aG5zpVkXDVMHLERX9

You’ll have the option to pre-record the presentation, and be available during the meetup for live Q&A, or deliver the presentation live. We will work with you on the optimal set up, and share with you some cool Ansible swag!
 

FEEDBACK

Have any questions you’d like to ask, or issues you’d like to see covered? Please send us an email to the-bullhorn@redhat.com.