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, Stefano Dalla Palma, Dario Di Nucci, and Damian A. Tamburri present AnsibleMetrics, a Python-based static source code measurement tool to characterize Infrastructure-as-Code. Although the authors focus on Ansible, the most used language for IaC, this 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.erties focusing on Ansible, one of the most popular IaC language to date, and shows how they can be used to analyze IaC scripts.
You can access the paper here.