I wrote a small Vagrantfile and helper library for provisioning VMware VMs from boxes hosted on Artifactory. I put this together with the intent of helping us easily provision our Rancher/Cattle/Docker-based platform wholesale on our machines to test changes before pushing them up.

Here it is: https://github.com/carlosonunez/vagrant_vmware_artifactory_example

Tests are to be added soon! I’m thinking Cucumber integration tests with unit tests on the helper methods and Vagrantfile correctness.

The Problem

Ansible is a great configuration management platform with a very, very extensible language for expressing yoru infrastructure as code. It works really well for common workflows (deploying files, adding authorized_keys, creating new EC2 instances, etc), but its limitations become readily apparent as you begin embarking in more custom and complex plays.

Here’s a quick example. Let’s say you have a playbook that uses a variable (or var in Ansible-speak) that contains a list of tables, like this:

In Powershell, a typical, run-of-the-mill pipeline looks something like this:

Get-ChlidItem ~ | ?{$_.LastWriteTime -lt $(Get-Date 1/1/2015)} | Format-List -Auto

but really looks like this when written in .NET (C# in this example):