Kubernetes and other cloud-native strategies might be putting configuration management out to pasture, but I found myself writing a playbook recently while learning how to create infrastructure as code for Azure. I needed to start my Flask web server and Postgres database with systemd, which isn’t a pattern that’s easily supported by Docker. I got this working with Docker Compose, however, and this post will show you how! Create a Docker Compose file with the following services: version: '2. … »

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: