What tool/feature/process/technology are you most thankful for?

[MarjorieFreeman]

What technology, tool, process, or framework are you (or have you been) most thankful for this year, and why? How did it help you solve a problem? 

It can be a study technique, a clever hack, a favorite feature, or a configuration management tool to help with complex deployments. Whatever it is, I'd love to know about it! 

[Trevor]

Hello Marjorie,

The tool that I'm most grateful for is Ansible.  

The power provided by the modules, that do the
actual heavy lifting, is impressive.  Being able to
have to focus on the parameters that are needed
for a configuration, and not the intracacies of the 
actual steps to configure things, is a huge benefit.
Of course, it is still helpful to understand the 
concepts involved in the configuration, but the
need to know each step is removed/eliminated
by the muscle provided in the modules.

In summary, I've got kisses and hugs for Ansible.

[MarjorieFreeman]

Trevor,

I know so many professionals out there that have MAJOR love for Ansible. The love story is infinite with that tool! 

How long have you been working with Ansible?

[Trevor]

Hello Marjorie,

Relative to many of the other Ansible heavyweights in the commnunity,
I'm still in my infancy with this tool.  Roughly, I've been in the Ansible 
arena for about 18 months.  I'm still building muscle for sure, but that
goes without saying.  

One of the reasons that I have incentive to continue with my
development is due to Ansible being the foundation of the RH294
course.  In my opinion, Red Hat did a great thing by making
Ansible the focus of this course.  I'll stop here with that
commentary, because that's a conversation for another thread.

Automation has penetrated the IT domain, and Ansible is the
tool that's leading the charge.  Others will serve themselves
well to hit their wagons to this front-runner!!!

[Armanator]

The tool that I'm most thankful/happy/exctied about right now is Tabby. https://tabby.sh/

Most likely because it's new for me.

Since I work in SysOps, disk management is a daily occurance for me so I'm extremely happy when a server is using LVM. 

All of the automation tools save time, money and frustration so I have to agree with Trevor. Ansible, Terraform and bash scripting are all tools that I'm happy to have.  

[MarjorieFreeman]

Thanks for your reply, Armann! Wow, I've heard of Ansible, Terraform, and bash, but not Tabby. This is cool.

I'll keep an eye out for this one, for sure.