Appformix and Ansible: Product Deployments Made Simple

We began by searching for an orchestration and configuration management tool for our test lab, and we ended up with Ansible playbooks that we ship with our product.

Automation is a key tenet of our engineering team at AppFormix. Repetitive tasks are automated, such as those surrounding continuous integration, host configuration, maintenance, and backups. This saves time and allows us to document a task, which in turn enables others to understand, contribute, and use the automation. Our engineers spend their time creating our product that provides infrastructure performance optimization for cloud-based datacenters, leaving the mundane work to computers.

We began our automation with Python and Bourne shell scripts, since we were familiar with these languages. Such scripts worked great for a set of steps to perform on a single host, but become very complex when managing several hosts (like in a cloud). We used ssh, scp, and Fabric, but found it challenging to maintain configuration about every host and handle errors robustly.

As our engineering team and deployments grew in size, we needed a sustainable tool to configure our testbeds and deploy our software. We chose Ansible for a number of reasons, including:

• Agentless. Ansible’s agentless design did not require Continue reading