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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