An Empirical Study of Utilization of Imperative Modules in Ansible

In recent years, a configuration management tool is adopted to manage complicated and huge systems such as bare-metal servers, cloud computing resources and our personal computers. Such a tool makes the operations to deploy services more efficient and eliminates dependencies on the specific system operators. The operations are required to be idempotent for reproducible deployment. However, the imperative modules whose operations may not be idempotent are used frequently to execute user-defined scripts on the target system; it is unclear why and how they are used, though using them frequently is believed to be a bad practice.In this paper, we studied why and how imperative modules are used in a configuration management tool, Ansible. We found that imperative modules are mainly used to perform operations that are not supported by Ansible, and about 45% of imperative modules are replaceable by other modules; the replaceable modules might be idempotent. We, therefore, recommend developers to look at replaceable modules before using imperative modules since replaceable modules might make their operations idempotent.