How Flex Ciii Uses Ansible Tower for Benchmarking

We love stories about how Ansible Tower has solved problems and made work easier. Special thanks to Hugh Ma from Flex for sharing his story about Ansible Tower.

Here at Flex, our Ciii Rack Scale Platforms team regularly deploys Openstack and Ceph on large clusters with various SDN platforms. With repeated multi-rack deployment, validation, benchmarking and tear down, automation plays a crucial role in improving the agility of our operations. For a small automation team to support a large group of engineers working across 200+ servers, it is necessary to select the right tools to simplify deployment, test infrastructure installation, debugging, and results collection. This enables the team to focus on reference architecture designs, benchmark logic, and results analysis. 

Background

We had originally developed a python-based automation framework for our testing. Some of its tasks included configuring operating system and OpenStack settings through their APIs, launching test workloads, and parsing output. However, with a small team, upkeep of such a large code base and an increasing complexity of test parameters became tedious  We started looking at configuration management(CM) tools. We wanted a CM tool that was based on Python but easy for non-developers to use and straight-forward to troubleshoot. After building Continue reading