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.

Create a PKI in GoLang

 June 5, 2017

Lately I have been programming quite a bit and - for the first time - I have used Golang doing so. Go is a very nice language and really helped me with the development. One of the reasons why I have enjoyed this much Go is the standard library, which is amazing. I would like to share today the easiness of creating a basic Certificate Authority and signed certificates in Go.

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.

libVirt on Hetzner

 April 26, 2017

After many years of using Hetzner as a server provider, and having rented from them multiple servers for many reasons, I decided to rent a server with 128Gb of RAM to do some tests with many (virtualized) machines on top of CentOS.

As it often happens, hosting providers put in place a lot of security measurements that sometimes make doing simple stuff more complex. The first approach I tried was using the (only) Ethernet interface as a bridged interface, but that did not brought me very far. Speaking with the support they pointed out that it was impossible in my setup, so I moved to the second option: the broute.

Vagrant etcd cluster

 March 21, 2017

Sometimes I need to do some tests which are destructive and I need to perform them over and over until I figure out a process that reliably brings me to a desired state. I usually create some kind of easy to provision environments and work on it.

In the last few weeks I found myself working on an etcd cluster, so I created an environment with Vagrant, and since I had to write the majority of this by myself, since I have not found anything on Google that suited my needs, I’m going to share this with you.

Ansible Inventories

 March 1, 2017

I often receive questions about Ansible Inventories (far more often than any other Ansible component). My guess is that Inventories are effectively among the most complex things in Ansible.

Ansible Inventories are complex in the following ways:

• After you have decided an Inventory model is hard to change it, in fact you would probably be required to touch all your Playbooks to make everything working again
• There is not a single way of doing Inventories
• Often Inventories are the glue to make a generic Playbook run properly on your specific architecture.

Grouping philosophies

The two main philosophies I saw in the many years I’ve worked with Ansible are:

FOSDEM 2017

 February 5, 2017 -  Bruxelles, BE

FOSDEM is a must for all open source enthusiast in Europe and close by. I think that the reasons to go to FOSDEM are different from the reasons of many other conferences, but equally valid. The comparison with DevConf is obvious, due to the temporal closeness of the two events.

I think that DevConf is more about enterprise grade software (or close to be), while FOSDEM is more about experimentations and community. The causes for this are probably obvious if you consider that DevConf is mainly sponsored by Red Hat, while FOSDEM is completely community driven.