DevOps Articles

The Zen of Ansible

Recently, https://github.com/redhat-cop/automation-good-practices/pull/42 to adopt https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/ as an overall guiding principle for designing good automation content. While there is definitely some very good advice to “The Zen of Python” that can be applied to Ansible content, adopting it in its entirety would not provide the best user experience that Ansible is capable of and known for. Its presence as a guiding principle for content design gives the wrong impression and re-enforces a mindset we don't want to recommend.

Your Ansible automation content doesn’t necessarily have to follow this guidance, but they’re good ideas to keep in mind.

These aphorisms are at the heart of why applying guidelines for a programming language to good Ansible automation content didn’t seem right to me.