What a week at Red Hat Summit 2026! I had a great time connecting with the XLAB Steampunk team at their booth in Atlanta. Their product, Steampunk Spotter, is one of the most practical tools I have seen for maintaining Ansible and Terraform code quality at scale.
Steampunk Spotter: Automated Code Analysis
Steampunk Spotter analyzes your Ansible playbooks and Terraform configurations to catch issues before they hit production:
- Best practice enforcement — identifies anti-patterns, deprecated modules, and suboptimal configurations
- Security scanning — flags hardcoded credentials, overly permissive settings, and compliance gaps
- Performance recommendations — suggests optimizations for faster execution
- Terraform support — extends the same quality analysis to infrastructure-as-code beyond Ansible
The tool integrates into CI/CD pipelines, giving teams immediate feedback on automation code quality without requiring deep Ansible or Terraform expertise from every contributor.
Joint Session with Swift
One of the highlights was their speaking session with Swift (the global financial messaging network), demonstrating how enterprise-scale organizations use Steampunk Spotter to maintain thousands of Ansible playbooks across teams. When you operate critical financial infrastructure, automation code quality is not optional — it is a compliance requirement.
Why This Matters
As someone who has written 8 books on Ansible and built automation platforms for enterprises, I see the same pattern everywhere: organizations adopt Ansible or Terraform enthusiastically, but code quality degrades as teams grow and playbooks multiply. Without automated analysis:
- Playbooks drift from best practices
- Security issues accumulate in base roles
- New team members copy anti-patterns from existing code
- Technical debt compounds silently
Tools like Steampunk Spotter address this by shifting quality left — catching problems at commit time rather than in production incidents.
The Team
Great conversations with the XLAB Steampunk team:
- Gregor Berginc — CEO
- Uros Raztresen — Engineering
- Dragan Radolovic — Solutions
- Suvasish Ghosh — Technical Leadership
Their passion for automation quality is genuine, and the product reflects years of deep Ansible ecosystem expertise.
Try It
Start with a free assessment for your Ansible or Terraform scripts: steampunk.si/spotter
