December 13, 2016
When I speak with people that are starting with Ansible from Puppet, the first thing they want to experiment is Ansible Galaxy.
This leaves me very sceptical, since I think the default mode in Ansible should be DIY.
Since I’ve found myself in this situation far to many times, I decided to write down all the reasons why you should avoid Ansible Galaxy in the majority of situations.
Using Ansible Galaxy often violates the Ansible way.
My interpretation of the Ansible Way, is do not do adopt overkill solution (also known as the classic “Keep It Simple Stupid” principle).
Many times the Ansible Roles you can find in Ansible Galaxy are completely overkill because are created by people coming from the Puppet world (that has a completely different approach).
Modules that install for you and configure NTP or Java for any possible distribution (and sometimes even different OS) means that you substitute a couple of Tasks with hundreds of lines of code.
Often the majority of the code can be stripped because is not applicable to the specific environment.
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December 1, 2016
The single most frequent complain I hear about Ansible is about it’s slowness.
This is very common, but even more common among people that used to use Puppet.
There are many reasons why Ansible is slower than Puppet.
The three main reasons are:
- Linear execution: Ansible will execute each operation in order and will not run many steps at the same time as Puppet does.
- SSH Connection: all Ansible commands will be issued from the control system to the controlled system via SSH. On the other hand, in Puppet, all commands will be issued locally on the controlled host by the Puppet agent.
- Host limitation: since the Ansible Controller is involved with the process of applying changes to the controlled system, a limited number of systems can be changes at once.
Those limits come out from design decisions that preferred a simpler Playbook writing and a safer execution rather than speed.
There are some things that can be done to increase the performances of Ansible:
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November 29, 2016 - London, UK
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Published on November 21, 2016
Authored by Fabio Alessandro Locati
Published by Packt Publishing Limited
Ansible is an open source automation platform that assists organizations with tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and task automation.
With Ansible, even complex tasks can be handled easier than before.
In this book, you will learn about the fundamentals and practical aspects of Ansible 2 by diving deeply into topics such as installation (Linux, BSD, and Windows Support), Playbooks, modules, various testing strategies, provisioning, deployment, and orchestration.
In this book, you will get accustomed with the new features of Ansible 2 such as cleaner architecture, task blocks, Playbook parsing, new execution strategy plugins, and modules.
You will also learn how to integrate Ansible with cloud platforms such as AWS.
The book ends with the enterprise versions of Ansible, Ansible Tower and Ansible Galaxy, where you will learn to interact Ansible with different OSes to speed up your work to previously unseen levels
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Buy it on Packt
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October 30, 2016 - Milano, IT
From the 25th to the 27th of this month I’ve been at the SMAU in Milan (Italy).
The SMAU (Salone Macchine e Attrezzature per l’Ufficio, that would be Exposition of Machinery and Equipment for the Office) is an historical fair started in 1964 and that has had many changes over the years, for instance some years it has been opened to the general public, other times it was only for business visitors.
This year the event was targeted to business visitors.
Read More October 25, 2016 - Milano, IT
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September 28, 2016
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This article deals with Ansible Tower <= 3.0. If you are looking for information around Ansible Tower >= 3.1, please look my newer article on the topic.
In the last few months I’ve setted up multiple times Ansible Tower, but I’ve noticed that there is not much documentation on how to perform basic maintenance on Ansible Tower High Availability setup, so I decided to write an article about it.
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July 11, 2016
Recently a customer asked me to help him debug an Ansible Playbook that was throwing a very generic error that was not helping at all.
The error was:
ERROR! Syntax Error while loading YAML.
As soon as I saw the error, I already guessed which problems could trigger such error: it’s either a bad usage of spaces, a badly escaped column within a value, or a variable escaping problem.
With a couple of grep runs, I identified it as the variable escaping problem.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog