Operational Maturity with Ansible + GitLab for Drift Detection & Remediation

Description

Teams keep saying “shift-left,” but real operational maturity shows up in your pipeline. In this walkthrough, I demo a full Ansible + GitLab CI/CD flow for Linux drift detection & auto-remediation—from linting and dry-runs to security scans with Trivy, canary testing on a cloned VM, and artifact generation. You’ll see how I package an Ansible Runner container, push to Harbor, and set up the groundwork for nightly remediation via Kubernetes. What you’ll learn Designing a pragmatic, enterprise-grade CI/CD for infrastructure code Linting & dry-run strategy for Python, YAML, and Ansible playbooks Building and reusing an Ansible Runner container; pushing to Harbor Security scanning (Trivy) and generating SBOMs E2E canary testing: clone a VM, run plays, publish artifacts Using group_vars for org-wide standards (DNS, NTP, SSH) Roadmap: Kubernetes CronJob for nightly drift checks & remediation Tools/stack Ansible, GitLab CI/CD, Trivy, Harbor, vSphere/VCF, Kubernetes Chapters below for quick navigation. If this helped, please like, subscribe, and drop a comment with what you want automated next. Links Repo (mirror): https://github.com/virtualelephant/vmware-ansible-framework Hashtags #Ansible #GitLabCI #DevOps #PlatformEngineering #SRE #OperationalMaturity #vSphere #Kubernetes #Trivy #SBOM 4) Timeline headers (chapters) 0:00 Intro & why operational maturity matters 0:30 What this framework does (Ansible + pipeline) 1:58 Pipeline tour: big picture 2:30 Linting: Python, YAML, Ansible 3:01 Dry-run of all Linux playbooks (idempotency + early failures) 3:31 Build Ansible Runner image & push to Harbor 4:00 Security scans (Trivy) & SBOM plan 4:25 E2E canary testing: clone VM, target plays 5:35 Artifacts: seeing job output & results 6:24 Roadmap: SBOM + downloadable tarball artifacts 6:56 Nightly remediation via Kubernetes CronJob 7:35 Repo tour: inventories, playbooks, collections 8:43 Inside the Runner container (Dockerfile) 9:49 Entrypoint: how jobs execute 10:16 Playbook set overview (agent, packages, upgrades, audit) 11:33 OS audit: DNS, NTP, SSHD templating + per-host summary 13:14 group_vars/all/global.yml standards (DNS/NTP/search domains) 14:56 Platform-agnostic approach; global vs local “globals” 15:58 CI helper: clone-test-VM playbook (canary strategy) 17:58 Dry-run logs: what to look for 18:52 Build → push → scan recap 19:37 vSphere view & cleanup plan 21:26 Running Linux plays against the canary VM 22:30 Auto-discover new playbooks in the pipeline 22:47 The 1% daily improvement mindset 23:45 Reducing human error (MTBF/MTTR impact) 25:16 Next up: vCenter/ESXi/K8s drift checks 26:30 DNS lessons learned (real-world impact) 27:30 Closing & CTA