Dozer: Migrating Shell Commands to Ansible Modules via Execution Profiling and Synthesis

Abstract: Software developers frequently use the system shell to perform configuration management tasks. Unfortunately, the shell does not scale well to large systems, and configuration management tools like Ansible are more difficult to learn. We address this problem with Dozer, a technique to help developers push their shell commands into Ansible task definitions. It operates by tracing and comparing system calls to find Ansible modules with similar behaviors to shell commands, then generating and validating migrations to find the task which produces the most similar changes to the system. Dozer is syntax agnostic, which should allow it to generalize to other configuration management platforms. We evaluate Dozer using datasets from open source configuration scripts.