Infrastructure as Code

At the 14th Ansible Meetup in Zurich, I gave a talk on integrating Ansible and Terraform. The session focused on the challenges of provisioning infrastructure, the strengths of each tool, and how to effectively make them work together. The Core Challenge While Ansible is a powerful configuration managment solution, using it for pure cloud infrastructure provisioning comes with hurdles. It lacks resource dependencies, doesn’t maintain an infrastructure state, and its declarative nature means running a “check mode” on infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet will simply fail. (There is an upcoming talk about a terraform plan implementation for Ansible - stay tuned) ...

Tracking IPs, networks, servers, and virtual machines manually in Excel and Confluence creates an airgap that prevents seamless automation. I shared our journey to bridge this gap during my talk at the 10th Ansible Meetup in Zurich. As we pushed for wider adoption of configuration management, we realized we needed a robust source of truth inventory, leading us to migrate to Netbox for IPAM and device management. Here is a breakdown of how Netbox and Ansible integrate, how context data is structured, and why we sometimes have to bypass modules to interact directly with the API. ...