I was recently asked by a few different people about why I have such strong feelings about Python in production on Void’s infrastructure. I’ve also been asked at work about why I’m unhappy with using Ansible even though it ticks all the boxes for being a pretty good host management tool. I figure its high time to look at why I care about languages in production. So at first this doesn’t seem like it should matter.

I recently decided to try the Caddy webserver project’s implementation of a webserver written in Golang. It had many interesting things going for it, including automagic certificate renewal via ACME and Let’s Encrypt; “plugins” written in a sane language; dramatically simplified configuration; and perhaps in one of the most boastful statements I’ve seen of any software recently, it claims to be “Production-Ready” (features page, right hand side). Given that it took me the better part of a day to get a functional Caddy role for Ansible, I really question this claim.

As anyone who’s spent more than 10 minutes around me knows, I’m fascinated by software and by the development and management of the infrastructure that surrounds it. While I’m usually more interested in the machinery and software that surrounds projects I work on, the human machinery is also fascinating, especially when it breaks down. When I joined the Void project I started out managing the Kansas City mirror, and configuring it with Ansible and other tools.

Ansible is a configuration and systems management tool from RedHat. The general idea is that you express in Ansible the state you would like the machine to be in, and then when you run Ansible against a host the state will be applied. For example, you don’t say you want to restart a service, you define its state as “restarted” and then Ansible will ensure that this happens at some point.

For about a year now I’ve been working on a side project. After working at UTD and having run LDAP and Kerberos, I thought it would be very nice to have something like those services, but much easier to stand up and operate. Thus NetAuth was born. If you’d like to find out more, NetAuth lives at https://netauth.org.