Andromeda: A Dataset of Ansible Galaxy Roles and Their Evolution

Abstract

Cloud-native applications increasingly provision infrastructure resources programmatically through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scripts. These scripts have in turn become the subject of empirical software engineering research. However, an often-overlooked part are the software ecosystems that have grown around the IaC languages. For example, Galaxy is an ecosystem for the popular Ansible IaC language. Galaxy features a large number of so-called "roles", which are reusable collections of Ansible code akin to libraries for general-purpose languages. In contrast to, and despite their similarities, such IaC ecosystems have enjoyed far less attention in the literature than library ecosystems for general-purpose languages. In this data showcase paper, we present Andromeda, the first dataset capturing the Ansible Galaxy ecosystem, its roles, and their evolution. Andromeda provides structural representations of more than 125 000 role versions, and upwards of 800 000 concrete changes between such versions extracted from the underlying git repositories. Andromeda aims to provide an extensive view of the contributor side of the Galaxy ecosystem, which we hope will stimulate additional research on IaC ecosystems.