TY - JOUR
T1 - AnsibleMetrics: A Python library for measuring Infrastructure-as-Code blueprints in Ansible
AU - Dalla Palma, Stefano
AU - Di Nucci, Dario
AU - Tamburri, Damian A.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) has recently received increasing attention in the research community, mainly due to the paradigm shift it brings in software design, development, and operations management. However, while IaC represents an ever-increasing and widely adopted practice, concerns arise about the need for instruments that help DevOps engineers efficiently maintain, speedily evolve, and continuously improve Infrastructure-as-Code. In this paper, we present AnsibleMetrics, a Python-based static source code measurement tool to characterize Infrastructure-as-Code. Although we focus on Ansible, the most used language for IaC, our tool could be easily extended to support additional formats. AnsibleMetrics represents a step forward towards software quality support for DevOps engineers developing and maintaining infrastructure code.
AB - Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) has recently received increasing attention in the research community, mainly due to the paradigm shift it brings in software design, development, and operations management. However, while IaC represents an ever-increasing and widely adopted practice, concerns arise about the need for instruments that help DevOps engineers efficiently maintain, speedily evolve, and continuously improve Infrastructure-as-Code. In this paper, we present AnsibleMetrics, a Python-based static source code measurement tool to characterize Infrastructure-as-Code. Although we focus on Ansible, the most used language for IaC, our tool could be easily extended to support additional formats. AnsibleMetrics represents a step forward towards software quality support for DevOps engineers developing and maintaining infrastructure code.
KW - Infrastructure as Code
KW - Software metrics
KW - Software quality
U2 - 10.1016/j.softx.2020.100633
DO - 10.1016/j.softx.2020.100633
M3 - Article
SN - 2352-7110
VL - 12
JO - SoftwareX
JF - SoftwareX
ER -