Ansible

CI/CD with Ansible Tower and GitHub

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Overview

Over the last few years CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) thanks to new technologies has become a lot easier. It should no longer be a major thorn in the side of developers. Many are moving to cloud platforms which has CI/CD built-in (Azure DevOps for example), others are using Kubernetes which clearly reduces a lot of the complexity around CI/CD. Still at many organizations I see Jenkins or other complex and often homegrown tooling. I certainly recognize this tooling was needed but in 2019 there are better, more streamlined options. Now I get it, our butler Jenkins has served us well, for many years, he has become part of our family. But just like the famous Butler, Alfred from Batman, he has gotten old and likely it is time to look into retirement.

In this article we will discuss and demonstrate how to use Ansible Tower and GitHub for CI/CD.

A video presentation and demonstration is available at following URL: https://youtu.be/lyk-CRVXs8I

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Building A Niche Cloud: A Pragmatic Approach

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source: https://innolectinc.com/how-smart-is-your-team/teamwork-ants-building-a-house/

Overview

Before getting started you might want to read about the birth of the niche cloud in the first part of this two part series.

We have all heard the saying, you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. Yes that is true, but we aren’t thankfully dogs. Learning to do something new of course, requires an open mind-set and a desire for change. Many organizations are getting left out of digital disruption these days because they keep falling back on old outdated ideas, behaviors and habits. Our minds are so full, so occupied and so tired we simply cannot grasp or don’t have the energy for anything new. We spend our time applying what is new to what we know, which is old.

In this article lets reset our minds and look at an approach to build a niche cloud from the ground up. Instead of pealing back the onion we will apply layer after layer until we have the onion itself. Of course I realize there is a lot more and this article is just scratching at the surface, nevertheless it is an approach, a basic rule-set and guideline for getting started.

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Ansible Tower Cluster Configuration Guide

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Overview

In this article we will setup and configure an Ansible Tower cluster on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). If you are interested in a single all-in-one deployment, I have already documented this here.

Ansible Tower clustering replaces the traditional active/passive with an active/active configuration. It provides not only HA but scalability as well. Ansible Tower has two critical components: Tower instances running API/Scheduler and the database. RabbitMQ is used for communication between the Tower instances.

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Ansible Getting Started Guide

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Overview

Automation is one of the most critical areas of improvement in most organizations. Today, most companies are in the process or re-inventing themselves in one way or another to add software development capabilities and as such, take full advantage of the digitalization of everything. Software development release cycles are changing in order to release faster. Continuous delivery, where every change is potentially it’s own release is becoming the new standard. Infrastructure is following suit, after all, continuous delivery is not about just software changes but all changes and infrastructure plays a key roll. For any of this to work of course, 100% automation is required. To achieve that goal, an automation language that is easy and applicable to development and operations is needed. Ansible is that language and if you are not on-board yet, now is your chance not to miss the train because it is leaving the station. Ansible is easy, Ansible is powerful and Ansible is flexible. This guide will show that and get you up and running with Ansible before your coffee gets cold.

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Ansible Tower and Satellite: End to End Automation for the Enterprise

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Overview

In this article we will look at how Ansible Tower and Red Hat Satellite 6 integrate with one another, providing end-to-end automation for the enterprise. Satellite is a systems management tool that combines several popular opensource projects: Foreman (provisioning), Katello (content repository), Pulp (database), Candlepin (subscription management) and Puppet (configuration management). While puppet is directly integrated into Satellite, many organizations would rather use Ansible because of its power, simplicity and ease-of-use.

Ansible Tower integrates with Satellite, allowing organizations to run playbooks against the hierarchy and groups of servers defined in Satellite. Additionally, Ansible Tower can dynamically update its inventories with hosts and their updated facts from Satellite at anytime. Hosts show up in Ansible Tower under the groups defined by Satellite. This allows organizations to use Satellite to define their infrastructure, provision hosts, provide patch management while leveraging Ansible to deploy and manage software configuration. It also allows other teams the ability to run playbooks and automation against the infrastructure defined by Satellite. Personally I am a huge fan of this loose coupling and find this solution much more advantageous than a direct coupling of Ansible in Satellite.

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Ansible Tower Installation and Configuration Guide

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Overview

In this article we will setup and configure Ansible Tower on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). By now unless you are hiding under a rock, you have heard about Ansible. Ansible is quickly becoming the standard automation language used in enterprises for automating everything. Ansible is powerful, simple, easy to learn and these of course are the main reasons it becoming the standard everywhere. Ansible has two components: Ansible core and Ansible Tower. Core provides the Ansible runtime that executes playbooks (yaml files defining tasks and roles) against inventories (group of hosts). Ansible Tower provides management, visibility, job scheduling, credentials, RBAC, auditing / compliance and more. Installing Ansible Tower also installs Ansible core so you kill two birds with one stone.

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OpenStack Heat and Ansible – Automation Born in the Cloud

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Overview

In this article we will look at how Ansible can be leveraged within OpenStack to provide enhanced capabilities around software deployment. Before we get into the details lets understand the challenge. There are typically two layers of automation: provisioning and deployment. Provisioning is all about the underlying infrastructure a particular application might require. Deployment is about installing and configuring the application after the infrastructure exists. OpenStack Heat is the obvious choice for automating provisioning. Heat integrates with other OpenStack services and provides the brains, that bring OpenStack powered cloud to life. While Heat is great for provisioning infrastructure, software deployment is not one of its strengths and trying to orchestrate complex software deployments can be rather clunky. That is where Ansible comes into play and as you will see in this article, they fit together perfectly.
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