We are pleased to announce gavika.administrators.

The Ansible role provides a declarative method to create Linux user accounts with administrative privileges. In other words, these users have sudo access without password and are empowered to run all commands on the system.

You might be wondering why you would need a role when you can write a couple tasks yourselves in an Ansible playbook. The reason is, Do Not Repeat Yourself(DRY). Instead of writing such tasks over and over, use the abstraction provided by the role. You just have to write some YAML declaration and be done with it. Moreover, the maintenance is outsourced to an Apache licensed open source software. The role has Molecule tests to boost your confidence.

Yesterday, we announced the launch of Ansible role to install and configure AWS CloudWatch Agent.

You might have seen my other open source Ansible roles on Ansible Galaxy and Github.

In the same spirit, the company, Gavika Information Technologies Pvt. Ltd. Bangalore, has started publishing open source projects on Github.
Ansible role to install and configure AWS CloudWatch Agent is the first project. Expect more projects in the future.

These are some guidelines for the Ansible role projects that Gavika follows:

Last Saturday, the Bangalore PHP User Group conducted a meeting. The venue was same as the last time, Microsoft office, Bangalore! The topic of the meeting was Framework Shootout. The frameworks represented were:

• Zend Framework
• CakePHP
• Symfony
• WordPress

I was glad to get an opportunity to represent the Zend Framework. The slides I presented with Ganesh H S can be downloaded or viewed online at SlideShare.

I liked all the presentations. Personally, I believe Zend Framework and Symfony are the two PHP5 frameworks you would want to seriously consider using in your projects. The strengths and weaknesses of each framework varies. In a previous post we discussed the reasons to use Zend Framework. Sjoerd de Jong has offered to conduct training sessions on Symfony for free.

Today, the Bangalore PHP User Group had a meeting. The meetup.com site reports that sixty eight people attended the meeting. The venue was at Microsoft. The increasing participation of Microsoft in PHP conferences and meetings have taken many by surprise. Microsoft were kind enough to offer free Pizza for all the attendees.

They have given me a copy of Windows 7 Release Candidate which expires on June 1, 2010. If time permits, I will sure try to install it as a virtual guest.