256 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
256 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
---
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author: "David Moreau Simard"
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categories:
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- community
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tags:
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- ansible
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- openstack
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date: 2017-05-08
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title: "ARA is one year old! A look back at the past year."
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slug: ara-is-one-year-old-a-look-back-at-the-past-year
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type: post
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---
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ARA is one year old, happy birthday ARA !
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ARA's come a long way since the early prototypes.
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The latest version, [0.13](https://dmsimard.com/2017/05/05/ara-ansible-run-analysis-0-13-is-out-and-its-awesome/), looks pretty awesome.
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It even caught the eye of Michael DeHaan, the author of Ansible !
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{{< tweet 861007096803995648 >}}
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Let's go back in time to look at the humble beginnings of the project and some
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of the important milestones that marked it's history this past year.
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## An idea and a first prototype
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I was beyond frustrated from trying to understand and troubleshoot Ansible
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playbook runs at scale.
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In the [OpenStack](https://www.openstack.org/) and
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[RDO](https://www.rdoproject.org/) communities, we heavily leverage Ansible for,
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amongst other things, continuous integration and testing jobs.
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This meant part of my days were spent looking at tens of thousands of lines of
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Ansible playbook output. The [human_log](https://gist.github.com/cliffano/9868180) callback
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did not really help, it almost made matters worse by making the output even larger.
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I got the idea for ARA on Friday **May 6th 2016**.
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I started hacking that evening and after what was probably the most time I've
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spent coding in a weekend, I had a prototype to share with close colleagues
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and friends to validate the idea with the very first demo video.
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The family was unfortunately neglected during that weekend !
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{{< youtube K3jTqgm2YuY >}}
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<br>
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## A very, very important contributor
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One of those colleagues that ended up finding out about this prototype was
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Lars Kellogg-Stedman ([@larsks](https://twitter.com/larsks)) and I owe a lot of
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ARA's success to him today.
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I don't consider myself a professional programmer by any stretch. Just a system
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administrator passionate with building tools to help him in his job.
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Lars came around with [code contributions](https://github.com/openstack/ara/commits?author=larsks)
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for things I admittedly wasn't very good at.
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A much better database schema, a better structure and framework for the flask web
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application, a lot of great improvements to the callback plugin, UNIT TESTS
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(of which there was probably none at the time) and I could keep going.
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Lars was pretty busy with other projects at the time, which made me appreciate
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so much more the time I spent discussing and developing ARA with him.
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## ARA's first public appearance
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On **May 21st 2016**, I shared ARA for the first time to the public in a blog post:
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[ARA: An idea to store, browse and troubleshoot Ansible playbook runs](https://dmsimard.com/2016/05/21/ara-an-idea-to-store-browse-and-troubleshoot-ansible-playbook-runs/).
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With this post came a second demo video:
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{{< youtube k3qtgSFzAHI >}}
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<br>
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## ARA becomes an OpenStack community project
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We're **June 7th 2016**, [ARA is one month old and we've broken 200 commits already](https://dmsimard.com/2016/06/07/ara-one-month-and-200-commits-later/).
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**June 8th 2016**, the [patch](https://review.openstack.org/#/c/321226/) to make ARA
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an OpenStack community project merges and [github.com/openstack/ara](https://github.com/openstack/ara) is born.
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To this day, I still keep the [github.com/dmsimard/ara](https://github.com/openstack/ara) repository around for
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the sake of keeping the history of issues and pull requests that were created before ARA
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joined the OpenStack community.
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## A first OpenStack project starts using ARA
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This came to me as a surprise, **[September 10th 2016](https://review.openstack.org/#/c/368345/)**,
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a Kolla contributor implemented ARA to their integration tests in order to help them
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figure out what's going on.
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It was the [first official OpenStack project to use ARA](https://dmsimard.com/2016/11/09/visualizing-kolla-ansible-playbooks-with-ara/).
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It all snowballed from there.
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## A second OpenStack project tries ARA
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After I [shared that Kolla used ARA](https://dmsimard.com/2016/11/09/visualizing-kolla-ansible-playbooks-with-ara/),
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the OpenStack-Ansible project submitted a [patch](https://review.openstack.org/#/c/396565/)
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to add it to their project on **November 11th 2016**.
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[OpenStack-Ansible](https://github.com/openstack/openstack-ansible) was a very important early adopter of ARA, I owe them a lot.
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OpenStack-Ansible simply operated at a much larger scale than we did at RDO.
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They had thousands of tasks, many more results and this highlighted a lot of the assumptions
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and flaws that ARA had at the time on operating at a large scale.
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The UI and the performance were simply not suited for this kind of scale and we were able
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to improve ARA a lot thanks to their feedback.
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## ARA 0.10: A stable database and a first UI redesign
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**December 2016**: [ARA 0.10 was the biggest release of ARA at the time](https://dmsimard.com/2016/12/01/ara-0.10-the-biggest-release-yet-is-out/).
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It marked the first version where we felt the database schema would not move as much
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and we could manage to not break users by implementing SQL migrations without too much
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development overhead.
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ARA 0.10 also shipped a first major UI redesign that would later be the foundation
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of the interface ARA still uses today:
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{{< youtube zT1l-rFne-Q >}}
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<br>
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## ARA 0.11: ARA gets a logo and a new UI prototype
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**[January 2017](https://github.com/openstack/ara/commit/0d5d0939a6b7a319d99acc1fb20d4ca282bd76ab)**,
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Jason Rist ([@knowncitizen](https://twitter.com/knowncitizen)) came up with a logo for ARA !
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With the icon:
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Without the icon:
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It looked awesome, I was really happy about it and it first made it's way in
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[version 0.11](https://dmsimard.com/2017/02/13/announcing-the-ara-0.11-release/) of **February 2017**.
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This is also around the time where I started experimenting with yet another redesign
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for the user interface:
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{{< youtube h3vY87_EWHw >}}
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<br>
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I feel like version 0.11 was the tipping point where users outside of the OpenStack
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community *really* started getting interested in ARA.
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I got plenty of interest over social media and started getting a lot of questions from users.
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{{< tweet 831617879804088325 >}}
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<br>
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## ARA 0.12: A second UI redesign lands
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**March 2017**, [ARA 0.12](https://dmsimard.com/2017/03/12/an-even-better-ansible-reporting-interface-with-ara-0-12/) is released
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with a first iteration of the new user interface.
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0.12 was the first version I felt confident recommending to users running Ansible at a large scale.
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The UI redesign had those large scale users in mind while staying efficient and intuitive for small scale users.
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It made browsing large amount of contents easy and straightforward and a lot of considerations went into making the interface as responsive as possible. It also very significantly improved one of the key features of ARA, the
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[static HTML generation of the web application](https://ara.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.html#generating-a-static-html-version-of-the-web-application).
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0.12 was also the first time I did a voiced demo of the ARA web interface to highlight its different features:
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{{< youtube aQiN5wBXZ4g >}}
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<br>
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The amount of interest in ARA was growing from all over the place.
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It was exciting, motivating but also a bit overwhelming.
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This is about the time where I [reached out](http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2017-March/114509.html)
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to the OpenStack community to ask if they wanted to help developing ARA.
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This call for help brought a few contributions but not as much as I would have hoped.
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The fact that ARA is not my full time job means I have to spend a lot my
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personal time on the project but in the end, the user feedback is so rewarding
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that I don't mind too much.
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That said, I have to say I am extremely grateful to my employer, Red Hat, and my
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managers who don't mind me spending time on ARA. Red Hat is awesome.
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## An Ansible meetup talk and STICKERS !
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**April 2017**, I was invited to speak at the [Ansible Montreal](https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-Montreal/events/238557821/)
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meetup to talk about how Ansible users can extend Ansible with the help of plugins.
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I totally had to make ARA stickers to bring to the meetup !
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{{< tweet 844173191627116545 >}}
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I did not bring enough stickers, though. It was a limited print and I wanted
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to keep some for the next occasion. The stickers were gone in minutes !
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The meetup was a great opportunity for me to highlight how ARA was taking advantage
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of the plugin system in Ansible.
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{{< tweet 852318379406962688 >}}
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You can find the slides for that talk (*in french*) [here](http://redhat.slides.com/dmsimard/comment-personnaliser-et-etendre-ansible-module-actions-et-callbacks).
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## ARA 0.13: Where we are today
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**May 4th 2017**, there's lightsaber battles at the Red Hat Summit and [ARA 0.13 is released](https://dmsimard.com/2017/05/05/ara-ansible-run-analysis-0-13-is-out-and-its-awesome/).
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{{< tweet 860111867552944128 >}}
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ARA 0.13 improved on the foundation that 0.12 brought: bug fixes, new features, better performance
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and a better and more streamlined UI.
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There were so many improvements in 0.13 that I had to create yet another video demo
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because the demo from 0.12 felt outdated.
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{{< youtube k3i8VPCanGo >}}
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<br>
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The amount of interest in ARA with this new release is absolutely nuts.
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Lots of comments on [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/ansible/comments/69gkpz/hi_ransible_a_new_version_of_ara_ansible_run/) and
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so many Twitter mentions, likes and retweets that I had to create a filter for
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all the email notifications... My phone wouldn't stop ringing!
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## The future: what's next
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I could have never predicted what would become of this idea I had a year ago and
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with that in mind, I definitely can't predict what the next year holds for ARA.
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On the technical side of things, there are clear things we need to be doing to
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further improve ARA.
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ARA needs full python 3 compatibility, we need to have a better split of the
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components (web application, API, client, CLI) and things like that.
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I'm not a frontend developer and I'm convinced a professional UX developer could
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make the UI so much better.
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There's other very interesting opportunities to make the life of Ansible users
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easier, not just with Ansible itself but through it's implementation in other
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tools.
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There are [questions](https://www.reddit.com/r/ansible/comments/69gkpz/hi_ransible_a_new_version_of_ara_ansible_run/dh6tiyt/)
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with the eventual Open Source release of [Ansible Tower](https://www.ansible.com/tower)
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and how we might see Tower and ARA working together.
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ARA might also end up integrated in [some shape or form](https://review.openstack.org/#/c/444088/)
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with [Zuul](http://status.openstack.org/zuul/), OpenStack's famous gate and pipelining
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system.
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Some people have also been requesting ARA to be a native plugin in [Molecule](https://github.com/metacloud/molecule/issues/728).
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What's next ? Only time will tell !
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Thanks to everyone that was involved with ARA so far, even as a user, your feedback
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and questions have contributed to shaping ARA into what it is today.
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See you next year :)
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