[ ← blog / ansible ](/) May 26, 2020  ·  \#ansible  ·  3 min read # Sponsoring Jeff Geerling's work Earlier this month, I signed up as a sponsor for [Jeff Geerling](https://github.com/geerlingguy) on GitHub. ![Jeff Geerlinng's GitHub sponsor's page](/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2020-05/Screen%20Shot%202020-05-26%20at%209.24.38%20PM.png?itok=GG-4Et90) If you aren't familiar with Jeff Geerling, he's been beyond impactful in the Ansible and Drupal world. I remember the first time he showed his [Dramble](https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-dramble) and I was like "wahhaat". For those who are not aware, it is was a cluster of Raspberry Pi devices. At that time, it was used to demonstrate using Ansible to provision a LAMP stack across multiple servers, today it's using Kubernetes. The first time I remember using Jeff's work was when I set up a local development environment at a previous company. We used [Aegir](https://www.aegirproject.org/) in production to power our Drupal site-building hosting platform (think Wix, 1&1.com, but for schools.) But, we did not have a fully standardized local development environment. I had built a Vagrant setup using Puppet. But Puppet was (is?) hard (compared to Ansible.) One of the maintainers of the Aegir project, [ergonlogic](https://github.com/ergonlogic), at the time, was working on a project called [Valkryie](https://github.com/GetValkyrie/valkyrie)., which is how I learned about Ansible and then Jeff's work. It used Ansible to provision a local Aegir environment and made heavy usage of the infamous `geerlingguy.*` roles. We didn't use Valkyrie, but I learned from it and rebuilt our local development environment. We were able to have a replication of production and execute multibranch development locally. It allowed not only us developers, but the system administrators to test and run tools they developed to help automate releases and other integrations. ![Aegir local hosting environment](/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2020-05/Screen%20Shot%202015-01-09%20at%201.06.52%20PM.png?itok=iHT-bIUC) That software as a service product was built on top of [Panopoly](https://www.drupal.org/project/panopoly). I contributed often to Panopoly and went to Milwaukee for plenty of meetups and sprints, hosted by [David Snopek](https://www.drupal.org/u/dsnopek) one of the maintainers of Panopoly. We even used Ansible to build a virtual machine image that could be used to create a Vagrant or regular VirtualBox appliance for sprinting ! While that project is gone, I created a somewhat similar version as my local development environment . This was about a year after DrupalVM was created. Once I was at Commerce Guys (now [Centarro](https://www.centarro.io/)), I then developed a Vagrant environment for interacting with [Platform.sh](http://platform.sh) to make local development a little bit easier . I used Ansible as the way my site was deployed and managed as well until I moved over to Ansible. Same with [ContribKanban](https://glamanate.com/tags/contribkanban) when it was self-hosted. *Shoot*, I even used it recently for setting up a Jenkins server to run through some deprecations reporting before we have the infrastructre on [Drupal.org](http://drupal.org) This is why I am sponsoring Jeff's work. Over the past six years his Ansible work has helped me solve so many problems over the course of my career that I wish I would have done this sooner. So, **thank you Jeff, for always creating and always contributing to the Ansible community.** Your work has made impact upon impact for folks. ![](/themes/custom/mglaman/images/headshot.webp)Thanks for reading I write about Drupal, PHP, and the quiet infrastructure behind large sites — caching, config, and testing. New posts land every week or two. [Subscribe via RSS →](/rss.xml) [About me →](/about-me) [← Older Sustaining tools that support Drupal contribution sprints ](/blog/sustaining-tools-support-drupal-contribution-sprints) [Newer → Boost your test writing productivity with PHPUnit for PhpStorm ](/blog/boost-your-test-writing-productivity-phpunit-phpstorm)