Ansible Your Toaster

Servers are critical infrastructure, and deployments are crucial business processes. We employ every tool at our disposal to make sure that our server and app deployments are predictable, repeatable, and reliable. One of the tools we use at Chromatic to ensure reliable machines and deployments is Ansible.

Developers' computers and development environments, on the other hand, seldom receive the kind of care and attention that servers get. This means that the machines we use, and the development environments we spend our days in, can become disorganized collections of tools whose configurations can't easily be shared with our colleagues or rebuilt in the event of a disaster.

Fortunately, it turns out that Ansible works just as well developers' machines as it does on servers. In this session we'll discuss how to use Ansible to install, configure, and update our critical development infrastructure with an eye to predictability, repeatability, and reliability.