Infrastructure as Code for IBM i: Ansible, DevOps, and the MOP Way

IBM i has excellent Ansible support via the ibm.power_ibmi collection. The Ansible-for-i-MOP repo contains the playbooks I use in Method of Procedure workshops — structured runbooks for upgrades, migrations, and routine operations that replace 2-hour manual procedures with 5-minute automated jobs, with a full audit trail.

Bob can generate these playbooks from natural language: “Back up PRODLIB to IFS with today’s date in the filename, then send a message to QSYSOPR if it fails.” That’s a Ansible playbook in 30 seconds. For IBM i admins new to IaC, this is the fastest on-ramp.

Merlin (MerlinLab) closes the loop: Git for RPG source, CI/CD pipelines on commit, RPGUnit tests automated. The combination of Ansible (infra) + Merlin (app) gives IBM i shops a complete modern DevOps picture.