Meet Anže Luzar of XLAB Spotter at Ansible Community Day 2023

Learn about XLAB Spotter's Ansible Playbook Scanning Tool and contributions to the Ansible community. Join the Ansible Challenge starting October 12, 2023, for a chance to win prizes.

Introduction

At the Ansible Community Day in Berlin 2023, I had the privilege of sitting down with Anže Luzar from XLAB Spotter to discuss the groundbreaking Ansible Playbook Scanning Tool known as “Steampunk Spotter.” This innovative tool complements the enterprise journey of Ansible automation by optimizing processes, enhancing reliability, security, and compliance, and offering a suite of advanced features for playbook developers and IT professionals. In our engaging conversation with Anže Luzar of XLAB Spotter at the Ansible Community Day in Berlin, we gained valuable insights into the remarkable contributions and future aspirations of this dynamic team. Anže, a DevSecOps Engineer, leads the charge in toolchain development, particularly in crafting the CLI and integrations for Steampunk Spotter.

Ansible Community Day

The Ansible Community Day in Berlin 2023 is an event organized by The Ansible Community Team at Red Hat. It is designed to connect with people who use, contribute to, and develop the Ansible project globally. This event serves as a platform to engage with the diverse Ansible community, including users, contributors, and developers, and to highlight their experiences and contributions.

Understanding XLAB Steampunk Spotter

Before diving into our interview with Anže, let’s take a moment to grasp the significance of XLAB Spotter. This Ansible Playbook Scanning Tool is designed to analyze Ansible playbooks comprehensively. It goes beyond merely identifying errors; it recommends playbook improvements, ensures compatibility with the latest Ansible versions, and detects deprecated modules and parameters. XLAB Spotter further empowers users to define custom rules and policies, check for best practices, and offer convenience features such as automatic issue fixing and module documentation. What sets it apart is its versatility — it can be integrated into various workflows, including command-line scanning, Git repository scanning, CI/CD integration, and code editor analysis. This means it’s a valuable asset for playbook developers, quality assurance managers, operations managers, and IT security specialists.

The Interview: Unveiling the Power of XLAB Spotter

Luca Berton: Guten Tag, friend. I’m here with Anže of XLAB Spotter. So, please introduce yourself to our friend.

Anže Luzar: Guten Tag. Wir sind hier in Berlin. But I will do it in English. So, yeah. We are from XLAB Steampunk. And I am a DevSecOps Engineer. And I’m leading the toolchain part. So, we’re actually doing the CLI, the Steampunk Spotter integrations.

This is my focus on that. But we’re actually preparing a lot of interesting things. Probably you have questions about it, right?

Luca Berton: Yeah, first of all, I will thank you for this interesting presentation that you did here for the Ansible Community Day. Can you tell me a little bit about the contribution to the community?

Anže Luzar: Yeah, actually, we did a little research with Steampunk Spotter,