The openshift-ansible-contrib repository serves as a collection of supplementary Ansible roles, playbooks, and provisioning code designed to extend the capabilities of the primary openshift-ansible repository. Written primarily in Python, this project provides community-contributed and experimental tooling for OpenShift and Atomic Platform deployment and management across multiple infrastructure environments.
The repository's core offerings include additional Ansible roles that complement standard OpenShift deployment procedures, enabling users to customize and extend their installation workflows. Beyond roles, the project contains comprehensive provisioning code for six major cloud and virtualization platforms: Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, VMware, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, and Red Hat Virtualization including oVirt. Each platform has dedicated reference architecture implementations that guide users through infrastructure setup and configuration specific to their chosen environment.
A significant portion of the repository consists of supporting scripts and playbooks aligned with Red Hat's published reference architectures. These materials provide tested patterns and best practices for deploying OpenShift in production-like scenarios across different infrastructure providers. The repository explicitly notes that some of these scripts and playbooks are deprecated, indicating an ongoing evolution of the codebase as deployment patterns and tools mature.
The project is classified across multiple domains reflecting its broad scope: it encompasses CI/CD tooling, cluster management, DevOps tools, infrastructure-as-code, configuration management, automation, and cloud-native technologies. The Ansible-based approach positions it as a configuration management and deployment automation solution within the Kubernetes and containerization ecosystem.
The repository maintains a testing infrastructure using tox for managing Python virtual environments and executing test suites. The testing framework supports multiple Python versions and includes linting checks via flake8 and YAML validation through yamllint. Tests can be run sequentially or in parallel using detox, allowing developers to validate changes across different Python environments. The testing documentation provides specific commands for listing available test environments, running complete test suites, executing individual test environments, and entering virtualenvs for interactive debugging and additional validation.
Contribution to the project is governed by a dedicated contributing guide, indicating an active community development model. The repository explicitly marks its contents as unsupported code, positioning it as a community resource rather than officially supported Red Hat software. This designation allows for experimental features and contributions while managing expectations around production readiness and support guarantees.
The combination of multi-cloud provisioning capabilities, reference architecture implementations, and extensible Ansible roles makes this repository a resource for organizations seeking to deploy OpenShift across heterogeneous infrastructure environments. The emphasis on testing infrastructure and contribution guidelines suggests an active development community working to maintain and expand the tooling available for OpenShift deployment and management scenarios beyond what the primary openshift-ansible repository provides.
