Playbooks or Makefiles - Choose Your Trade-offs Before It's Too Late

Learn to make strategic decisions between Makefiles and Ansible Playbooks for artifact generation and project automation in this 16-minute conference talk from DevConf.CZ 2025. Explore the trade-offs between quick runtime execution with Makefiles versus maintainable, readable code with Ansible Playbooks through practical examples from two community projects. Discover when to prioritize speed over maintainability and vice versa, particularly for projects with infrequent updates where slow runtime execution may be acceptable in exchange for easier code maintenance. Examine how modern LLM-based code assistants impact these architectural decisions and understand the readability challenges that emerge as Makefiles grow in complexity. Gain insights specifically tailored for system administrators and DevOps professionals who need to balance performance requirements with long-term code maintainability in their automation workflows.