Practical Ansible 2

 Published on June 5, 2020
 Authored by Daniel Oh, James Freeman, Fabio Alessandro Locati
 Published by Packt Publishing Limited

Ansible enables you to automate software provisioning, configuration management, and application roll-outs, and can be used as a deployment and orchestration tool. While Ansible provides simple yet powerful features to automate multi-layer environments using agentless communication, it can also solve other critical IT challenges, such as ensuring continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) with zero downtime.

In this book, you’ll work with Ansible 2.9 and learn to solve complex issues quickly with the help of task-oriented scenarios. You’ll start by installing and configuring Ansible on Linux and macOS to automate monotonous and repetitive IT tasks and get to grips with concepts such as playbooks, inventories, and network modules. As you progress, you’ll gain insight into the YAML syntax and learn how to port between Ansible versions. In addition to this, you’ll also understand how Ansible enables you to orchestrate multi-layer environments such as networks, containers, and the cloud.

Learning Ansible 2.7 - Third Edition

 Published on April 30, 2019
 Authored by Fabio Alessandro Locati
 Published by Packt Publishing Limited

Ansible is an open source automation platform that assists organizations with tasks such as application deployment, orchestration, and task automation. With the release of Ansible 2.7, even complex tasks can be handled much more easily than before.

Learning Ansible 2.7 will help you take your first steps toward understanding the fundamentals and practical aspects of Ansible by introducing you to topics such as playbooks, modules, and installation of Linux, Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), and Windows Support. In addition to this, you will focus on various testing strategies, deployment, and orchestration to build on your knowledge. The book will then help you get accustomed to features including cleaner architecture, task blocks, and playbook parsing, which can help you to streamline automation processes. Next, you will learn how to integrate Ansible with cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) before gaining insights into the enterprise versions of Ansible, Ansible Tower and Ansible Galaxy. This will help you to use Ansible to interact with different operating systems and improve your working efficiency.

Ansible Tower LDAP with self signed CA

 October 6, 2017

One of the big advantages that Ansible Tower and AWX (the open source and upstream version of Ansible Tower) bring to the table is the Role Base Access Control (RBAC). This will allow you to select which users (or teams) will be able to see which objects in Ansible Tower as well as which jobs they will be able to run.

Obviously to leverage the RBAC, you will have to have personal accounts for every user of your platform. Now, this can be very complex to do when you have hundreds of users, if you consider than you should then manage those users. Also, you probably already have those information in your company LDAP or Active Directory.

Ansible - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

 September 25, 2017 -  Tarragona, ES

Ansible Tower Open Source

 September 7, 2017

In October 2015, Red Hat bought Ansible Inc. As far as I know, in the acquisition, two close source components got acquired by Red Hat: Ansible Tower and Ansible Galaxy. Since the day of the acquisition, Red Hat has been very clear on the fact that those two components would have become open source at a certain point, even if there was not a public date or timeline yet. Making a codebase open source is not always easy and quick process. A lot of times many aspects need attention, from a legal review of the commits to a security audit of the code.

Ansible Tower 3.1 High Availability maintenance

 August 18, 2017

Around one year ago, I did a post around Ansible Tower High Availability maintenance, but in the mean time many things changed and that post is not up to date anymore, so I decided to create a new one that covers the same topic but for Ansible Tower 3.1.

From Ansible Tower 3.1 we lost the distinction of Primary Ansible Tower and Secondary Ansible Tower. That concept was related to the fact that the Secondary Ansible Towers were in a hot-standby mode. Since Ansible Tower 3.1, we have active-active clustering and therefore all Ansible Towers in your cluster are always active and there is no distinction between them.

Ansible Tower in Vagrant

 July 26, 2017

A lot of times during my job I found myself with the need of Ansible Tower testing environments.

In the last few weeks I created a Vagrant script to actually automate it.

As this is a single host installation, which is usually more than enough for the majority of tests I do, the Vagrant file is very easy:

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|

    # Set machine size
    config.vm.provider :libvirt do |domain|
        domain.memory = 2048
        domain.cpus = 1
    end

    # Tower/PgSQL machine
    config.vm.define "tower" do |tower|
        tower.vm.box = "centos/7"
    end

    # Ansible Tower configuration
    config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
        ansible.playbook = "playbook.yaml"
    end

end

I basically create a 2Gb of RAM machine leveraging libvirt and run an Ansible Playbook on it. The reason I created a 2Gb of RAM machine and I’ve not tried to shrink it further is because the Ansible Tower installation checks for 2Gb of RAM, and I wanted to create something easy. I’m sure I could patch the installer to accept a 1Gb machine, but it’s not worth the effort to me. Also, in my usual usage of the computer I rarely go below 11Gb free memory, so I’m not too concerned in giving 2Gb to my VM.

AnsibleFest London 2017

 June 23, 2017 -  London, UK

This year, I decided to go to AnsibleFest. Since the day before AnsibleFest, an Ansible Contributor Conference was scheduled, I decided to partecipate to both. On Wednesday morning I arrived to the location and I had the pleasure of speaking with few people before the begin of the Contributor Conference. The Contributor Conference was very interesting and I had the occasion to speak with many other people over the course of the day.

Automating your infrastructure with Ansible

 June 22, 2017 -  London, UK

PostgreSQL streaming replication for Ansible Tower

 May 31, 2017

Ansible Tower 3.1 has recently been released, and it does implement real HA. In fact, up to version 3.0, Ansible Tower multi-node installation, only allowed a single machine to be primary and the switch was not possible in an automated fashion, so if the primary Ansible Tower would have collapsed, an operator should have promoted one of the secondary Ansible Tower to be primary to be able to carry on the work. With Ansible Tower 3.1 this is no longer the case, since all Ansible Tower machines are active all the time.