No Compromise: Use Ansible properly or stick to your scripts

Ansible should help you to orchestrate your systems, automate the deployments and set up well defined infrastructures. But if you want to make something work quickly in Ansible the chances are high that you fall back to shell/command tasks, the mother of all evil. Those tasks usually prevent you from running dry runs where you would see the upcoming changes and you prevent Ansible to shine. So, we went blindly into every deployment and hoped the best. But we wanted to see what would change, we wanted to make ansible --check work again and therefore in this talk I will show you what we did wrong and what we changed to get there. More precisely, I will show what you can do to replace the nasty shell tasks with proper modules, plugins and filters, how they are developed, tested and included in your project.