Aahhh...vBSDcon 2017. Hard to believe it was 9 years ago. They say that the older you get, the faster time passes.
I've been interested in automation. As a baby sysadmin, I learned the three rules of the sysadmin:
- Back up Everything (and validate the backup regularly)
- Learn the command line (and avoid the GUI where possible)
- Automate Everything (and become lazy)
We ran puppet at work, but I personally am less of a fan of ruby than python, which means ansible and salt good, puppet and chef bad. I had looked at ansible, but couldn't really get my brain around it. I am a sysadmin and not a programmer. Benedict Rueshling did a talk on using Ansible to manage FreeBSD systems, which really jump started my interest.
I was happy that I got to hang out in the hacker lounge after day 1 of the conference. Allan Jude and Benedict helped me set up an ansible environment on my laptop, and Eric McCorkle gave me access to his FreeBSD stuff ansible repo on github.
Then last year, Benedict and I started collaborating on ansible, and I learned enough to become at least reasonably good at it. Since then, I have been able to leverage the knowledge I have gained from him, to set up not only a fairly robust set of playbooks and roles for my homelab, but I have also turned around at taught my team at work, and we are actually moving from puppet to ansible.
So I wanted to publicly (as if anyone reads this blog) thank Benedict and Allan and Eric for getting me started.