Ansible and Infoblox: Roles Deep Dive

As Sean Cavanaugh mentioned in his earlier Infoblox blog post, the release of Ansible 2.5 introduced a lookup plugin, a dynamic inventory script, and five modules that allow for Infoblox automation. A combination of these modules and lookups in a role provides a powerful DNS automation framework.

Summary

Today we are going to demonstrate how automating Infoblox Core Network Services using Ansible can help make managing IP addresses and routing traffic across your network easy, quick, and reliable. Your network systems for virtualization and cloud require rapid provisioning life cycles; Infoblox helps you manage those lifecycles. When paired with Infoblox, Ansible lets you automate that work. Ansible’s integration with Infoblox is flexible and powerful: you can automate Infoblox tasks with modules or with direct calls to the Infoblox WAPI REST API.

This post will walk you through six real-world scenarios where Ansible and Infoblox can streamline your network tasks:

1. Creating a provider in one place that is reusable across a collection of roles.
2. Expanding your network by creating a new subnet with a forward DNS zone. Ansible modules for Infoblox make this common two-part task simple.
3. Creating a reverse DNS zone, for example, to flag email from any Continue reading

8 Use Cases for Modernizing and Automating Workflows

Managing an organization’s many tools and business processes is becoming increasingly complicated as technology expands. Whether your teams are performing their weekly system reboot, or looking to configure instances to a desired state, it’s no secret that automation is critical to increase speed, efficiency, productivity, and accuracy. Listed below are several instances¹ where automation can help across your enterprise.

• Weekly system reboot: There’s nothing worse than doing the same thing for 8 hours a day! Eliminate repetitive, manual processes with automation.

• Enforce security guidelines: Rules are rules. It’s best to automate in an effort to achieve strict security standards.

• Monitor configuration drift: Use check mode with Ansible tasks to enforce desired settings and see if your configuration has drifted.

• Disaster recovery: Disaster recovery can involve a wide range of components. Act across different variables of the technology stack to identify problems and eliminate cross team dependencies.

• Command blaster: Remarkably easy to write, you can run commands across your environment for any number of servers.

• Database binary patching: Several databases use outdated binary sets. Patch the binaries in accordance with the release of the latest patch.

• Instance provisioning: Use modules for several cloud providers to create new instances and tailor Continue reading