As we all know, AI is still going strong as the latest and greatest thing since sliced bread. While it’s an amazing tool and is enabling lots of neat things to happen, I see it as an evolution of existing tools. Similar to how a hammer got superseded by a nail gun or roofing nailer. Sure anyone can use one, but using it with experience and skill increases the likelihood of quality output and efficient use.
Personally I’ve been using AI, and an AI coding agent, to make my dream of having our software become easily deployable. For the past 10+ years I’ve dreamed and pushed for a user interface that simplifies the deployment of our complex, but capable software. I know from looking at the data that we lose potential customers who are evaluating our software because of the complexity involved in simply looking at the software to see if it even fits the requirements. Despite my efforts, my past attempts at making this dream happen have not been accepted. We’re a small company with limited development resources and asking the developers to shift gears into a UI has never been in the cards or a priority.
This is where AI bridges the gap. It enables my capable and intelligent US non-development team to troubleshoot, vibe code, and create things that before AI, we were only able to imagine. Ryan, one of our solution architects, has taken previous internal work on playbooks, extended the capabilities, made official LINBIT Ansible modules, and is about to release these playbooks to the world – see him here demoing it. The LINBIT Ansible modules and playbooks will be a way for knowledgeable users to rapidly deploy our software, especially at scale. I want to take this a step further.
I’m not a developer, but I have 17 years experience with LINBIT, its software, and high availability. With help from AI, I created a user interface that is intuitive and allows users to deploy complex clusters without having to read a large manual or know the deep workings of LINSTOR, DRBD, and DRBD Reactor. My past experience with our software has been vital in creating this project as it simplifies complex tasks by asking only the necessary questions. This UI leverages the work of my team and leans on the Ansible playbooks. My hope with this tool is that it will lower the barrier to entry for people to rapidly test and deploy our software for general purpose use cases. The nice thing about it is if you do decide to continue using it, everything is deployed in a way that we would deploy it for our customers, allowing you to upgrade and maintain it as if it were manually deployed by an engineer. Here is a first preview of the deployment UI.
“Anything you want to, do it. Want to change the world? There’s nothing to it” … with AI it feels like this lyric from “Pure Imagination” is very real right now. This new project has sparked that feeling I had many decades ago when home computers first became accessible. If you have an idea for something, now’s the time to let your imagination run wild and see what you can come up with. Go play.
