Pseudo Development Environment

Overview

An Ansible development environment, or simply development environment, is the configured setup where developers create, test, and manage Ansible playbooks, roles, inventories, and related automation artifacts. It centers around a primary development desktop, which serves as the main workstation for these tasks. This environment typically includes essential tools like Ansible Core, virtual environments (e.g., using Vagrant, LXD, VirtualBox, Docker) for isolated testing, version control systems such as Git, and optional components like IDE plugins.

In the default open-source C2 Platform approach, the development desktop forms the entire environment, providing full flexibility for local development. In contrast, customer domains often use a virtual machine as the development desktop, paired with provisioned nodes managed through tools like vRealize Automation (vRA).

Pseudo Development Environment

A pseudo development environment is a suboptimal variant of the standard development environment. It is commonly encountered in constrained customer domains, such as Dutch government contexts, where security, resource limitations, or organizational policies restrict full flexibility. Unlike the ideal open-source setup, a pseudo development environment prioritizes shared resources and controlled access over individual engineer autonomy.

Key characteristics include:

• Shared Resources: The environment is often shared among multiple engineers. While each may have a separate desktop, target test nodes are communal. This requires coordination of tasks within and sometimes between teams to avoid conflicts during testing or development.

• Limited VM and Snapshot Management: Creating virtual machines (VMs) and snapshots is severely restricted and not automated, often involving manual approval processes. In a true development environment, engineers can provision as many VMs and environments as needed with complete flexibility, automated via Vagrant providers like LXD or VirtualBox.

• Performance Delays: Operations like creating, resetting VMs, or restoring snapshots take significantly longer due to reliance on shared infrastructure rather than local SSDs in an optimized local setup. This can slow down iteration and testing cycles.

• Automation Constraints: Automating VM and snapshot creation is limited by factors such as network separation, lack of API access, or security policies. This hinders rapid prototyping and experimentation, which are hallmarks of an effective Ansible engineering workflow.

Comparison to Standard Development Environment

The standard development environment emphasizes engineer empowerment, automation, and speed, aligning with open-source best practices. It allows Ansible engineers to fully test desired state configurations in isolated, reproducible setups. In contrast, the pseudo development environment trades these benefits for compliance and resource efficiency in enterprise settings. While it enables collaboration, it can introduce bottlenecks that greatly reduce productivity. From experience, this often leads to failing deadlines and sprint goals. A pseudo development environment may seem to work well initially, but as soon as more challenging Ansible engineering and testing get involved, things deteriorate quickly.

For example, in a standard setup, an engineer might use a local Vagrantfile in an inventory project to spin up test nodes instantly. In a pseudo environment, the same action could require submitting a request to a central IT team, waiting hours or days for provisioning. Some difficult automation problems require very frequent tests from a baseline, up to 15 or 20 times a day, which becomes impractical in such constrained setups.

Best Practices

The most effective best practice is to adopt the C2 Platform’s core concept of Open, unless: An open approach facilitates the reuse of ideas and code, not only within projects but even across different organizations. —prioritizing open-source approaches unless specific constraints demand otherwise. Dutch government organizations, for instance, can shift Ansible engineering to the open-source C2 Platform. This eliminates the need for each organization to develop its own closed-source roles for common components like Apache, Tomcat, or custom Ansible modules (e.g., for Microsoft Software Center). Sharing these resources openly fosters collaboration, reduces redundancy, and accelerates innovation.

This approach also creates a robust learning environment and enables engineers to become productive from day one. In contrast, pseudo development environments in customer domains often delay onboarding due to requirements for accounts, permissions, and security clearances, which can take months. An open-source setup bypasses these barriers, allowing immediate contributions.

Additional mitigations include:

• Advocate for policy adjustments to allow more automation, such as limited API access for VM management.
• Document shared resource usage guidelines to minimize conflicts.

By understanding these differences, teams can adapt their Ansible operations and engineering practices to work effectively within constrained environments while striving toward more ideal setups.