Balz Aschwanden and Michael Husar - Ansible upside down – Introducing the ANTS framework
We as systems administrators have several requirements when it comes to our environment: We want to stay flexible in regards to the tools we use. We want to keep overhead for daily business at a minimum and last but not least, we want to provide a workflow our coworkers and support staff feel comfortable using. How can we achieve all this?
The answer: Use what’s already available in your environment. Do not customize tools, but develop small scripts to glue them together and optimize your workflow.
As client services provider at a university, we face a heterogeneous but rather windows- heavy environment. It comes with the unique challenge to provide local support staff with tools to handle diverse client requirements.
In this talk, we present our approach to systems administration: How we use Ansible in pull mode for client configuration management and how we integrate it into our current Active Directory and Git infrastructure. The benefits: Infrastructure as code without additional backend components, Active Directory as a graphical frontend for our support staff and the freedom to modify and optimize our tool chain.