Verisk Analytics

We use Ansible. While Chef was considered for our configuration management and automation needs, the unique needs of our department pointed towards Ansible. To wit, that we needed to configure the machine and then hand it off to some other business unit. That business unit may in turn use an agent-based configuration management tool themselves to manage their machine, like Chef, Puppet or Salt. We couldn't use one of those, therefore, because if we did our agent would fight with that of our client's, so we chose Ansible.

We use Vagrant because we do cross-platform development, and because many of those that use our code are on Windows machines. Vagrant doesn't take over the network stack like Docker does, nor does it force us to use Hyper-V. It also allows us to spin up windows machines if needed.

Ultimately our environment is one based on virtual machines, so Vagrant just made way more sense than Docker Compose for us, even though much of our automation code is run on Linux.

We started out using MS Teams Board, but I just really started missing how much more cleanly JIRA handled tasks. I missed how each task had a name, tasks could be linked, tracked, commented on, and reported on.

We use StackStorm because we were already sold on Ansible but needed a flexible orchestration server from which to run our ansible code. Stackstorm, with its sensors and rules engine, was perfect for integrating ansible with other systems, such as ServiceNow.