[openstack-dev] ARA - Ansible Run Analysis: Would you like to help ?

Paul Belanger pabelanger at redhat.com
Thu Mar 23 11:49:20 UTC 2017


On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 04:42:34PM -0400, David Moreau Simard wrote:
> Hi openstack-dev,
> 
> There's this project I'm passionate that I want to tell you about: ARA [1].
> So, what's ARA ?
> 
> ARA is an Ansible callback plugin that you can set up anywhere you run
> Ansible today.
> The next time you run an ansible-playbook command, it'll automatically
> record and organize all the data and provide an intuitive interface
> for you to browse the playbook results.
> 
> In practice, you can find a video demonstration of what the user
> interface looks like here [2].
> 
> ARA doesn't require you to change your existing workflows, it doesn't
> require you to re-write your playbooks.
> It's offline, self-contained, standalone and decentralized by default.
> You can run it on your laptop for a single playbook or run it across
> thousands of runs, recording millions of tasks in a centralized
> database.
> You can read more about the project's core values and philosophies in
> the documented manifesto [3].
> 
> ARA is already used by many different projects that leverage Ansible
> to fulfill their needs, for example:
> - OpenShift-Ansible
> - OpenStack-Ansible
> - Kolla-Ansible
> - TripleO-Quickstart
> - Browbeat
> - devstack-gate
> 
> ARA's also garnered quite a bit of interest outside the OpenStack
> community and there is already a healthy amount of users hanging out
> in IRC on #ara.
> 
> So, it looks like the project is going well. Why am I asking for help ?
> 
> ARA has been growing in popularity, that's definitely something I am
> very happy about.
> However, this also means that there are more users, more feedback,
> more questions, more bugs, more feature requests, more use cases and
> unfortunately, ARA doesn't happen to be my full time job.
> ARA is a tool that I created to make my job easier !
> 
> Also, as much as I hate to admit it, I am by no means a professional
> python developer -- even less so in frontend (html/css/js).
> Being honest, there are things that we should be doing in the project
> that I don't have the time or the skills to accomplish.
> 
> Examples of what I would need help with, aside from what's formally on
> StoryBoard [4]:
> - Help the community (answer questions, triage bugs, etc)
> - Flask experts (ARA is ultimately a flask application)
> - Better separation of components (decouple things properly into a
> server/client/api interface)
> - Full python3 compatibility, test coverage and gating
> - Improve/optimize SQL models/performance
> 
> Contributing to ARA in terms of code is no different than any other
> OpenStack project but I've documented the process if you are not
> familiar with it [5].
> ARA has good unit and integration test coverage and I love to think
> it's not a project that is hard to develop for.
> 
> If you feel the project is interesting and would like to get involved,
> I'd love to welcome you on board.
> 
> Let's chat.
> 
Yes?

We are in the process of shutting down puppetboard.o.o for openstack-infra. I'd
like to get an infra-spec in place to potentially use ARA for our ansible runs.
So it is possible you'll get some patches your way.

-PB



More information about the OpenStack-dev mailing list