While I was writing for my second part of “Using RaspberryPi as an Azure agent for Pipelines” (you can see the part 1 here) I came across a tedious scenario: I needed to connect to different machines, download some software and perform some configurations, all using the terminal. I’m currently using a cluster of 4 raspberry pi as servers/agents/nodes/you name it, and after deploying the software on the first one I thought “there must be a better and faster way to achieve this”, and it is where Ansible comes into play.

I’ve recently switched to a DevOps role in a new company. I know some basic DevOps concepts, CI/CD, pipelines, builds, artifacts and so on, but never really laid my hands on it. I’ve been doing a bunch of Microsoft Learn modules related to DevOps and other key components that will be part of my new daily basis. One that caught my attention was the Host your own build agent in Azure Pipelines, which is a module from the Build applications with Azure DevOps learning path.

I’ve recently read about Universal Automation (UA), by Ironman Software. Among many other functionalities, it offers you the possibility to run background jobs and schedule your scripts to run at certain times. And that’s exactly what we will be exploring today. Before we start - Let’s understand the product naming 🔗This might sound irrelevant for now, but you will understand in a minute why I’m mentioning this. The first time I heard about an Ironman Software product it was the Universal Dashboard (UD). In the meantime, another product surfaced: Universal Automation.