Blogs

ARA is one year old, happy birthday ARA ! ARA’s come a long way since the early prototypes. The latest version, 0.13, looks pretty awesome. It even caught the eye of Michael DeHaan, the author of Ansible ! Let’s go back in time to look at the humble beginnings of the project and some of the important milestones that marked it’s history this past year. An idea and a first prototype I was beyond frustrated from trying to understand and troubleshoot Ansible playbook runs at scale....

I’m excited to announce the release of ARA: Ansible Run Analysis 0.13.0! ARA 0.13.0 is available on PyPi or from source on GitHub. I’m also happy to announce that ARA 0.13.0 will be the first version of ARA packaged for Fedora and CentOS EPEL. Stay tuned in the near future to hear when the packages will be available. Wait, what’s ARA ? ARA is an Ansible callback plugin that records your playbook runs, wherever it is....

Not even a month ago, I announced the release of ARA 0.11 with a bunch of new features and improvements. Today, I’m back with some more great news and an awesome new release, ARA 0.12(.3) ! That’s right, 0.12.3! Due to the nature of this new release, I wanted to be sure to get feedback from the users before getting the word out. We got a lot of great input! This allowed us to fix some bugs and significantly improve the performance....

We’re on the road to version 1.0.0 and we’re getting closer: introducing the release of version 0.11! Four new contributors (!), 55 commits since 0.10 and 112 files changed for a total of 2,247 additions and 939 deletions. New features, more stability, better documentation and better test coverage. The changelog since 0.10.5 New feature: ARA UI and Ansible version (ARA UI is running with) are now shown at the top right New feature: The Ansible version a playbook was run is now stored and displayed in the playbook reports New feature: New command: “ara generate junit”: generates a junit xml stream of all task results New feature: ara_record now supports two new types: “list” and “dict”, each rendered appropriately in the UI UI: Add ARA logo and favicon UI: Left navigation bar was removed (top navigation bar will be further improved in future versions) Bugfix: CLI commands could sometimes fail when trying to format as JSON or YAML Bugfix: Database and logs now properly default to ARA_DIR if ARA_DIR is changed Bugfix: When using non-ascii characters (ex: äëö) in playbook files, web application or static generation could fail Bugfix: Trying to use ara_record to record non strings (ex: lists or dicts) could fail Bugfix: Ansible config: ’tmppath’ is now a ’type_value’ instead of a boolean Deprecation: The “ara generate” command was deprecated and moved to “ara generate html” Deprecation: The deprecated callback location, ara/callback has been removed....

19 commits, 59 changed files, 2,404 additions and 588 deletions… and more than a month’s on and off work. 0.10 is out ! Where to get it ? Get started easily by installing and configuring ARA. I’m excited to tell you about this new release ! Here’s a few highlights ! An improved web application browsing experience A lot of work has gone into the browsing experience: less clicks, more information, faster....

Kolla is an OpenStack deployment tool that’s growing in popularity right now. An OpenStack installation by Kolla was even showcased by Chris Hoge and Mark Collier in one of the main keynotes at the recent Barcelona OpenStack Summit. Demo... containers with Kolla. So easy, even @sparkycollier can do it. @hogepodge has no cats or dogs: deploy a LAMP stack with Heat instead pic.twitter.com/uHetKLItEG — Robert Cathey (@robertcathey) October 25, 2016 Installing OpenStack is complex Installing and configuring OpenStack is no easy task – Kolla tackles this challenge with the help of Docker containers that are deployed with Ansible....

On May 21st, I wrote a blog post about ARA, an idea to store, browse and troubleshoot Ansible playbook runs. Let’s rewind a bit further back in time. On May 6th, I got tired of trying to make our human_log callback write user friendly HTML files. I simply wasn’t happy with my attempts… I’m a big fan of the UNIX philosophy: Do one thing and do it well. Trying to hack HTML writing into human_log didn’t feel like that at all....

The context Ansible can be used for a lot of things and it’s grown pretty popular for managing servers and their configuration. In the RDO and OpenStack communities, Ansible is heavily used to deploy or test OpenStack through Continuous Integration (CI). Projects like TripleO-Quickstart, WeIRDO, OpenStack-Ansible or Zuul v3 are completely driven by Ansible. In the world of automated continuous integration, it’s not uncommon to have hundreds, if not thousands of jobs running every day for testing, building, compiling, deploying and so on....