ANZ Pied Piper

The Ansible community is massive, so it is no surprise that version 2.9 came out with more than 3600 modules. This number keeps growing and it is motivating a change in how modules are distributed in the future. To read more about these changes you can read from Jeff Geerling himself However sometimes still you will come across with either: some functionality that hasn't been implemented on a module or a target for which there are no modules What do you do then? You have a few options: create your own module. This can be done in Python and even if you are not a Python guru you can find many tutorials that don't look intimidating at all you use the "shell" or "command" modules to run some other script if your target can be managed through a REST API then you can use the "uri" module REST API's are the basis for many automation tasks nowadays. An advantage of building automation through the API is that the workflow you build...

In the previous article  I explained that the configuration management ecosystem and the automation in general is too crowded and dynamic and it is easy to make the wrong decision that can be costly in the long term. In my opinion, one tool is emerging as the winner above the rest, and that tool is Ansible. It is no surprise that more and more modules are being released to manage other aspects of the IT infrastructure including on-prem hardware. One example of that is PowerMax/VMAX which got its first release in June 2019. This first version covers all the basics of storage provisioning including snapshots https://github.com/dell/ansible-powermax It leverages the popular PyU4V python library  which wraps the REST API that lives in Unisphere. The library provides way more functionality than that, so it wouldn’t surprise anyone to see more versions in the near future that provide more functionality. The “Product Guide” document in the “docs” folder of the DellEMC repo prov...