Blogs

After more than three years since the creation of the project, we are excited to announce that the version 1.0 of ARA Records Ansible is now available. This new release marks the deprecation of ARA 0.x and while full feature parity has not yet been achieved, we are moving forward and we will iterate to add missing features in future releases. Main changes from ARA 0.x The backend has been re-written from Flask to Django/Django-rest-framework A new API as well as built-in API clients are available to record and query playbook results The project’s dependencies have been decoupled: the Ansible plugins, API backend and web interface can be installed independently from one another The web interface has been re-written as a standalone project: ara-web In summary, all the different components before 1....

The first beta milestone for ARA 1.0 is out and ready for testing ! Main changes since 1.0.0a4 API: /api/v1/info has moved to / and / was improved with a link to the API index API: CORS_ORIGIN_WHITELIST now requires the scheme (http/https) as per django-cors-headers API: Playbook arguments are now provided when listing playbooks at /api/v1/playbooks Clients: API clients now support authenticating with specified credentials Ansible roles: The ara_api role now supports using postgresql for the server database Packaging The API server dependencies are now optional when installing ARA 1....

The release of ARA 1.0 draws closer with a third alpha milestone ! If there was a theme for this milestone it would be “back to basics”. In the previous blog post, I explained that ARA 1.0 was composed of several projects such as ara-server, ara-plugins, ara-clients, ara-web and ara-infra. As a user, developer and maintainer of these projects myself, I realized that the added complexity of keeping the projects separated did not provide enough value to be worth it....

Attempting to release a version 1.0 for ARA Records Ansible has been quite an adventure that started more than a year ago. The general vision hasn’t changed since then and the status updates from 2017 are still relevant from that perspective. Hundreds of commits later, the code underneath what will be released as ARA 1.0 has been almost entirely re-written from scratch, though. We’ve been making steady progress with the help of two new core contributors (thanks Florian and Guillaume!...

With two days of AnsibleFest instead of one this time around, we had 100% more time to talk about Ansible things ! I got to attend great sessions, learn a bunch of things, chat and exchange war stories about Ansible, ARA, Zuul, Tower and many other things. It was awesome and I wanted to take the time to share a bit about some of the great Ansible community projects that were featured during the event....

I was recently writing that ARA was open to limited development for the stable release in order to improve the performance for larger scale users. This limited development is the result of this 0.15.0 release. The #OpenStack community runs over 300,000 continuous integration jobs with #Ansible every month with the help of the awesome Zuul. Learn more about scaling ARA reports with @dmsimard https://t.co/l8zFXHqhhc — OpenStack (@OpenStack) April 18, 2018 Changelog for ARA Records Ansible 0....

The OpenStack community runs over 300 000 CI jobs with Ansible every month with the help of the awesome Zuul. It even provides ARA reports for ARA’s integration test jobs in a sort-of nested way. Zuul’s Ansible ends up installing Ansible and ARA. It makes my brain hurt sometimes… but in an awesome way. As a core contributor of the infrastructure team there, I get to witness issues and get a lot of feedback directly from the users....

So I got an idea recently… Let’s rebrand Ansible Run Analysis to ARA records Ansible. If you’d like to review and comment on the code change, you can do so here: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/547245/. Why ? I watched the last season of Sillicon Valley recently. The series, while exaggerated, provides a humorous look at the world of startups. I don’t have any plans on creating a startup but I love that it makes you think about things like needing a clever name or how you would do a proper “elevator” pitch to get funding....

Back in August, I posted about what was the roadmap for ARA 1.0 and why it was a very important milestone for the project. We’re now almost in December and I said there would likely be a beta version out by September. “What’s going on ?”, one might ask… A fair question. There’s definitely been progress and I could’ve been doing a better job at communicating updates other than the tweet from time to time....

More and more users requested other ways of reaching the ARA community and I’ve finally given in ! Until now, the only way of getting in touch was through IRC and I understand that, in 2017, IRC is not for everyone. Seamless communication across IRC, Slack and Discord That’s right, you can now reach us through Slack and Discord. Both are linked to IRC so messages sent to one will be relayed automatically to the others....