Announcing a Collins inventorying plugin for Ansible

[Steve Salevan]

Hey y'all,

There's something special coming in the air tonight for those of you who are interested in integrating Collins' powerful asset inventorying system with the Ansible systems automation tool.

Maintaining a manual host inventory in Ansible can become a veritable land of confusion, so I've added a dynamic inventory script which supports intelligent host grouping by Collins attributes and binds the full JSON representation of an asset to each host:

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/8089

If you'd like to get a sense into what variables are bound to each Collins-provided host within Ansible, look at the following sample JSON response:

http://tumblr.github.io/collins/api.html#asset-get-json-response

This pull request has been merged into the devel branch, so you won't have to wait even one more night to give it a whirl.  It should work with pretty much any version of Collins or Ansible, so if you're ready to turn it on (again), simply follow the instructions in the script itself:

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/plugins/inventory/collins.py

Don't lose my number if you run into any issues using this script, particularly from a performance standpoint; bug reports are welcome and appreciated.

Anyways, I hope that this tool helps Collins to make your life as a DevOps engineer less like a dance on a volcano and more like a scene from a night's dream.  Thanks for reading!

- Steve Salevan

[Dallas Marlow]

Nice work Steve!