Kubernetes Meets Event-Driven Ansible

In today’s fast paced world, every second counts and the ability to react to activities in a timely fashion can mean the difference between satisfying the needs of consumers and meeting Service-Level Agreements. Each are goals of Event-Driven Ansible, which seeks to further the reach of Ansible based automation by responding to events that meet certain criteria. These events can originate from a variety of sources, such as from an HTTP endpoint, messages on a queue or topic, or from public cloud resources. Kubernetes has become synonymous with managing infrastructure and applications in cloud native architectures and many organizations are reliant on these systems for running their business critical workloads. Automation and Kubernetes go hand in hand and Ansible already plays a role within this ecosystem. A new capability leveraging the Event-Driven Ansible framework is now available that extends the integration between both Ansible and Kubernetes so that Ansible automation activities can be triggered based on events and actions occurring within a Kubernetes cluster.

Event-Driven Ansible is designed using a concept called Rulebooks which consists of three main components:

• Actions - Triggering the execution of assets including an Ansible Playbook or module 
• Rules - Determination of whether received events Continue reading

Creating automation execution environments using ansible-builder and Shipwright

Reproducibility and consistency are two key traits that are the driving forces behind the popularity of containers. Consistency is also a principle found within Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. With only a few lines of YAML-formatted manifests, thousands of instances can be set up and configured uniformly. While the management of target instances is simple, it is the control node, or where the Ansible execution is initiated, that can  be the most challenging aspect. As Ansible is written in Python, does the machine have the correct version of Python installed?  Are the necessary Python modules installed? Are there any operating system dependencies needed? The list goes on and on.

These concerns, along with many others, led to a desire to leverage the benefits of containers to perform the control node’s role and eventually ushered in the concept of automation execution environments in Ansible Automation Platform 2. Running Ansible within containers is not a new concept and has been used quite successfully for some time now. However, there was no consistent process for building the container or executing Ansible from within the container. It seemed like everyone and anyone had their own version of running Ansible in a container. Ansible Continue reading