Declarative Engineering
Introduction
Back in 2016, when I was just getting into tech, I was introduced to Ansible, which we used as our infrastructure-as-code tool. At the time, I don’t think I fully appreciated just how capable it was.
Then, in 2020, while developing image-processing software, I started using Ansible heavily to build and manage our CI/CD pipelines. This was when I really began to appreciate what it could do.
If you’re not familiar with Ansible, at its core it uses a human-readable configuration language called YAML. But perhaps even more interesting is the templating engine behind it: Jinja2.
It was this combination of declarative configuration and powerful templating that really caught my attention—and ultimately changed the way I started thinking about building software and infrastructure.
application:
name: my-app
environment: production