antsibull-docs VS Ansible

antsibull-docs 2.6.0 has been released with a fix for EXAMPLES parsing and error message improvements.

More than two years ago the Ansible Docs Working Group started discussing the use of semantic markup for Ansible plugin/module documentation. This resulted in a specification that has been implemented as proofs of concept both for ansible-doc and the validate-modules sanity test, as well as for antsibull-docs. From the docs perspective this will improve plugin, module, and now also role documentation a lot, and in particular separate markup from content. (Right now you have to use C(...) and I(...) for values and option names, which stand for 'code-style' and 'italics'.)

antsibull-core 2.0.0a1 has been released. This major release drops support for Python 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8 and deprecates some compatability code (full changelog). It also includes a new feature needed by antsibull-build. antsibull-core houses shared code used by antsibull-build and antsibull-docs. If you use either of these tools, please help us test this new release. It can be installed with pip install -U antsibull-core==2.0.0a1. Note that you'll need the latest version of antsibull and antsibull-docs to use antsibull-core 2.0.0a1.

antsibull-docs 1.3.0 (changelog) has been released with several new features for the docs build! The most important changes are that now booleans are rendered as true and false instead of yes and no (https://github.com/ansible-community/community-topics/issues/116), and that a proper parser is used for Ansible markup, which properly escapes for example backticks instead of simply inserting them into the RST files (https://github.com/ansible-community/antsibull-docs/issues/21).

If you are using the antsibull-docs or antsibull-lint collection-docs CLI command from the antsibull package, consider switching to using the new antsibull-docs 1.0.0 package instead! It is more stable and comes with less potential baggage to carry around.

Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool that simplifies application deployment, cloud provisioning, and configuration management across diverse environments. It uses a declarative language to describe the desired state of the system, and then takes the necessary actions to achieve that state. Ansible has become incredibly popular due to its simplicity, agentless architecture, and extensive community support. Document: ansible.com, ansible basics

Ansible v2.16

Ansible is a tool used to help manage software automation processes, configuration management across machines, deployment as well as remote execution of commands and scripts. In sports, Ansible operates as the coach of your team by providing strategies (playbooks), and actions, and ensuring the smooth execution of tasks across your infrastructure, just like a coach guides and directs players (Servers)during a game.

They support for-if from python, too: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.1.x/templates/#loop-f... but I haven't tried the "recursive" keyword to know if ansible supports that. I say "ansible supports that" because they don't just drop jinja2 into ansible and call it a draw, they have a bunch of custom execution integrations: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.16.3/lib/ansible/...

To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck

In this article's context, it is simply a tool that provides a declarative way to automate your machine/OS to configure the development machine as you want (install package, modify the configuration, etc). Examples of these tools are Ansible, Puppet, etc.

Now we're getting more tangential, but for years, Ansible releases were named for Van Halen songs (see old Changelog here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.8.4/CHANGELOG.md)

In the lab to follow, we'll quickly provision a 3-node kubeadm cluster (1 master, 2 workers) on the cloud provider of your choice using an automation stack comprised of OpenTofu and Ansible, then deploy Rook Ceph using the official Helm charts and confirm that we are now able to successfully create CSI volume snapshots from PVCs by reusing the MinIO example from our last article.