CfgMgmtCamp 2026: Ansible Ecosystem

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CfgMgmtCamp 2026: Ansible Ecosystem

This post is part of a series of talks presented at CfgMgmtCamp 2026. Please see CfgMgmtCamp for all other talks.

Ansible for Beginners: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before I Learned the Hard Way

Speaker: James Freeman

Slides: Coming Soon

Video: YouTube

Getting started with Ansible is exciting and rapidly improves your productivity. However I’ve revisited playbooks that I wrote almost a decade ago and found the code today to be almost unmaintainable. Should I have created a role instead of a playbook? Was it really a good idea to copy-paste between projects? (Spoiler: yes, but we’ve all done it somewhere!) This talk shares the practical knowledge I’ve gathered over years of working with Ansible—the kind of insights that only come from actually using it in production, making mistakes, and finding better approaches. In this talk, I’ll share what worked, what didn’t, and why—so you can build automation you’ll still be happy with months down the line. You’ll leave with both the fundamentals and the perspective that usually takes years to develop.

OpenTofu Builds It, Ansible Configures It: Using the Right Tool for the Right Job

Speaker: James Freeman

Repository: GitHub

Slides: Coming Soon

Video: Talk was not recorded.

For years, I was asking myself the wrong question: “Terraform or Ansible?” As if infrastructure provisioning and configuration management were the same problem. Spoiler: they’re not, and trying to make one tool do both jobs is why your infrastructure code is a mess. This talk is about the liberation of discovering that OpenTofu (the Terraform fork) excels at infrastructure provisioning while Ansible owns configuration management—and that they work beautifully together when you go with the flow and use each tool for exactly what it was designed for.

Upgrading Fedora’s Monitoring - a real Tech Debt story

Speaker: Greg Sutcliffe

Slides: Presentation

Video: Talk was not recorded.

Over the last year I’ve been working on migrating Fedora’s aging Nagios & Collectd stack to Zabbix, using Ansible to deliver the full Zabbix config - no UI-side config needed.

In this talk, we’ll explore:

  • Why we moved to Zabbix over other tools

  • The perils of a separate monitoring role, and how to instead put your application monitoring in your application roles

  • The tech debt of figuring out how & why checks exist in your old stack… is “this one” even needed any more?

  • The people side of tech debt work - practicalities for helping the people around you to get on board when “the current thing still works, doesn’t it?”

It’s been an interesting journey getting this project over the line, and while there might not be any shiny new technologies to come from it, I think there are lessons worth sharing. We all have tech debt, after all.

Growing a startup using Ansible

Speaker: Johan Van de Wauw

Slides: Unavailable.

Video: Talk was not recorded.

Fluves and Marlinks are two sister companies in Ghent focusing on monitoring water & energy infrastructure, both onshore and offshore mostly using fiber optic sensing.
I want to tell the story of how our infrastructure grew with the company, from our first ansible playbook almost 9 years ago to the company we are now with 30 employees and deployments at different critical infrastructure sites all around the world, and under scrutiny of audits such as ISO 27001.

Due to the high volume of data we gather (acoustic sensing can generate terabytes of data per day) and our own interests, we have been self-hosting most of our work, in a time before data sovereignty was a thing and the cloud was still all the hype.

Most of our own development is done in Python, deployments are done using Ansible and I’ll touch which open source tools worked for us (amongst other proxmox, postgres, gitea, prometheus, grafana, restic) and how we deploy them, which problems we faced and solved and which ones we didn’t.

Even though we are not an open source company, we have contributed back patches to many of the tools we use, and we maintain a number of libraries.

The session is meant to be highly interactive. I want to mention which difficulties we are facing, such as stricter rules on remote access, and hope to hear how others are handling this.

How automation games can make us better engineers

Speakers: David Moreau-Simard and Greg Sutcliffe

Slides: Unavailable.

Video: YouTube

We all have constraints, like budget, time, and resources. Dealing with them through imperfect choices results in technical debt, while learning and better technology creates opportunities for optimizations and refactors.

How can we practice dealing with these things before they cause us significant issues ?

Factory‑sim games (like Factorio, Satisfactory, and many others) might drop us on an alien world with a pickaxe and a deadline: survive long enough to research technology and build supply chains to launch stuff in space.

  • Starting from scratch, we’ll need to learn what tools and architecture are available to us.
  • At first we’ll craft things manually like we would with a CLI but that doesn’t scale.
  • Soon, we start automating with machines (like scripts) and eventually we automate the automators, Ansible or Terraform style.
  • Then, entire factories can be packaged with clear inputs and outputs just like containerized applications.
  • Before long, these factories are connected by networks of conveyor belts, drones and trains like supply chains in the middle of pipelines.
  • We’ll need to troubleshoot issues and identify bottlenecks with the help of observability and alerting, too.
  • We might even need to defend ourselves and set up security.

Sound familiar?

These games mirror the skills we need as engineers. In this talk, we’ll explore some of these games, in order to show how they provide a fun and safe place to improve our skills in designing & building scalable systems.

Classic Infrastructures Command & Control

Speakers: Alessandro Franceschi

Slides: Unavailable.

Video: Talk was not recorded.

Pabawi is a new Web frontend to manage and inventory your infrastructure systems: it currently supports Bolt and Puppet, with planned integrations with Ansible and other tools that interface with good old “legacy” physical or virtual systems (there’s always an OS somewhere to deal with, after all).

The Ignite is a quick overview of Pabawi features.

A Pkl companion tool to bind tasks to configuration data

Speakers: Stoned Elipot

Slides: Unavailable.

Video: Talk was not recorded.

Infrastructure as Code may seem to be all about tools and their languages but it is mostly about models and the data to express them. This data must often be processed to facilitate its use by multiple tools, like

Ansible, OpenTofu, Helm or your favorite new shiny tool.

Hence data pipelines must be implemented. The targeted IaC tools can be used for this implementation, and also, of course your favorite interpreter.

The Pkl configuration language is a powerful ecosystem to organize, shape, validate, transform, etc. data and provide it to those tools in the appropriate form and syntax.

The proposal here is to use a simple companion tool to the Pkl language to help implementing the mentioned pipelines.

This tool defines so-called “tasks”, written in the Pkl language, eventually embedded in the very same Pkl modules defining the processed data. The tasks consist of any commands, parametrized by and consuming data produced by Pkl evaluations.

It is a tool to “bind tasks and Pkl”, or tpkl.

Client tooling to integrate with Pulp

Speaker: Matthias Dellweg

Slides: Unavailable.

Video: Talk was not recorded.

In this talk we will discuss client tools like ansible modules or cli to interact with your repositories managed on a Pulp server. We will focus on the technical aspect of how they are similar and why we build them on a library called pulp_glue.

The Director’s Cut: A new role for Ansible in Foreman

Speakers: Thorben Denzer and Jan Bundesmann

Slides: Presentation

Video: Talk was not recorded.

Ansible has long been a cornerstone of configuration management in the Foreman ecosystem. While the existing integration offers robust capabilities, users have expressed desire for DevOps workflows.

In this talk, we will introduce a reimagined Ansible integration, designed to address these needs.

This new approach brings advanced features, such as:

  • Version control integration
  • Isolated execution environments
  • Lifecycle management

For Foreman users and developers alike, this talk gives an overview of “foreman_ansible_director”, ATIX’s new Ansible integration for Foreman.

This overview consists of our design decisions, lessons learned during development, a look ahead and a live demo!

Introducing Pabawi. Puppet Ansible Bolt Awesome Web Interface

Speaker: Alessandro Franceschi

Slides: Unavailable.

Video: YouTube

Modern times allow extraordinary things, like writing from scratch modern web interfaces to hosts management tools without knowing how to code.

Pabawi is a Web Interface to Puppet, Ansible, Bolt and potentially any infrastructure management tool. It’s mostly written by Claude Sonnet, via Kiro, where the human, Alessandro Franceschi, keeps on asking, testing and asking again.

The presentation is both about Pabawi usage and features, and about the AI tools used in the process, with the inevitable lessons learned and things that proved to be useful.

From ‘undefined’ to ‘I Told You So’ - TypeScript for the Foreman Frontend

Speaker: Thorben Denzer

Slides: Unavailable.

Video: Talk was not recorded.

While JavaScript has long been the backbone of the Foreman frontend, both for plugins and core alike, I decided to shake things up for foreman_ansible_director.

A year and over 9,000 lines of TypeScript code later, I’m here to share what I learned.

This talk will explore:

  • The surprisingly smooth integration of TypeScript into an existing JavaScript ecosystem
  • The real benefits of type safety
  • Interoperability with existing code
  • What this implies for packaging

This talk isn’t just about TypeScript - it’s a story of how type safety can reduce errors, make life easier for developers, and improve maintainability of the codebase.

Automating Config Deployment with NetBox

Speaker: Christopher Rössler

Slides: Unavailable.

Video: Talk was not recorded.

At BCIX we have moved from writing switch configurations by hand to a mostly automated process centered around NetBox.

Previously, the information required for the network switch configurations has been scattered across different tools and locations:

  • IXP Manager (an open-source management platform designed to facilitate the operations and administration of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) developed by INEX)
  • NetBox
  • Existing device configurations.

This over time created inconsistencies. To solve this issue, we have come up with a four step plan:

  • Collecting Data in NetBox using ansible
  • Generating the configs with jinja2-templates
  • Compare and validate actual vs intended configurations
  • Deployment of the configs on the switches

This improved consistency across IXP Manager, NetBox and the switch configurations. Additionally this has enabled us to leverage NetBox for further automation tasks like preparing, announcing and doing Maintenances on the BCIX Peering Platform more efficiently.

Check out the other sessions at CfgMgmtCamp 2026 using the links below:

Here are links to all the talks on YouTube as well as related forum discussions:

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