Control with Ansible Tower, Part 1
This is the first in a series of posts about how Ansible and Ansible Tower enable you to manage your infrastructure simply, securely, and efficiently.
When we talk about Tower, we often talk in terms of Control, Knowledge, and Delegation. But what does that mean? In this series of blog posts, we'll describe some of the ways you can use Ansible and Ansible Tower to manage your infrastructure.
CONTROL - THE BASICS
The first step of controlling your infrastructure is to define what it is actually supposed to be. For example, you may want to apply available updates - here's a basic playbook that does that.
---
- hosts: all
gather_facts: true
become_method: sudo
become_user: root
tasks:
- name: Apply any available updates
yum:
name: "*"
state: latest
update_cache: yes
Or you may have more detailed configuration. Here's an example playbook for basic system configuration.This playbook:
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Configures some users
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Installs and configures chrony, sudo, and rsyslog remote logging
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Sets some SELinux parameters
Normally, we’d organize our configuration into Ansible roles for reusability, but for the purpose of this exercise we're just going to use one long playbook.
We'd want to apply this as part of our standard system configuration.
Continue reading
Getting to Know Jason McKerr, Director of Ansible Core
Knowing the members of our Ansible community is important to us, and we want you to get to know the members of our team in (and outside of!) the Ansible office. Stay tuned to the blog to learn more about the people who are helping to bring Ansible to life.
This week we’d like to introduce Jason McKerr, who joined Red Hat in January as the director of the Ansible Core team. Jason has been in the space before as the VP of Engineering for Puppet. Before Puppet he worked at SocialCode (The Washington Post Company) and MyWebGrocer as both a software architect and manager. And back in the day he was the first Operations Manager at the Open Source Lab at OSU.
What’s your role at Ansible?
The title says “director, Ansible Core team” but the role is really about working with all of the various user groups and communities around Ansible. The first priority is getting new features, bug and security fixes, and releases out the door - and to that end we published our first public roadmap for the 2.1 release. Additionally, I am really focused on getting Ansible into Red Hat product development cycles.
Testing Ansible Roles with Docker
Background
When you first start using Ansible, you go from writing bash scripts that you upload and run on machines to running desired end state playbooks. You go from a write-once read-never set of scripts to an easily readable and updatable yaml. Life is good.
Fast forward to when you become an Ansible power user. You’re now:
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Writing playbooks that run on multiple distros
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Breaking down your complex Ansible project into multiple bite-sized roles
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Using variables like a boss: host vars, group vars, include variable files
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Tagging every possible task and role so you can jump to any execution point and control the execution flow
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Sharing your playbooks with colleagues and they’ve started contributing back
As you gain familiarity with Ansible, you inevitably end up doing more and more stuff-- which in turn makes the playbooks and roles that you’re creating and maintaining longer and a bit more complex. The side effect is that you may feel that development begins to move a bit slower as you manually take the time to verify variable permutations. When you find yourself in this situation, it’s time to start testing. Here’s how to get started by using Docker and Ansible to automatically test Continue reading
How Ansible Makes Automating Windows Easier
In case you missed it, Ansible 2.0’s Windows support includes a number of improvements and new features that make automating Windows with Ansible easier. Because of Red Hat’s commitment to solid cross-platform management, you’ll also see an acceleration of these kinds of improvements in future Ansible releases. I’ll highlight a few of the items I’m most excited about from 2.0, and give a quick peek at what’s scheduled for future releases.
Windows Update Support
Update management is a common pain point for Windows administrators. The new win_updates module makes it easy to orchestrate updates during your maintenance windows- no more logging into individual machines to kick off updates or hoping a scheduled update pass actually ran!
IIS Modules
2.0 shipped with a suite of modules for managing IIS. From configuring websites, AppPools, virtual directories, and more- now Ansible can deploy and manage your IIS apps with ease.
Performance Enhancements to File Copy
Since WinRM doesn’t have a built-in file transfer mechanism, Ansible has to jump through some “interesting” hoops to deploy its module code and copy files from the control host to a managed Windows box. Historically, this process was very slow, and could only transfer small Continue reading
Ansible Network Technology Preview
One of the greatest strengths of Ansible is the tremendous community of individuals that have risen to the challenge of building Ansible into the top automation platform available. It is that community that has driven Ansible to focus on innovative solutions that are guided by simplicity. The community that makes Ansible great has pushed to expand the capabilities of Ansible even further to encompass more platforms and technologies that comprise today’s most complex IT infrastructures.
In response to the many asks from the Ansible community and enterprise customers, we are pleased to introduce Ansible network technology preview, which is available immediately. The Ansible network technology preview is built on the success of Ansible 2.0, and provides newly developed integrations for working with network devices. Developed in partnership with network vendors and the Ansible community, support for networking devices gives the Ansible community the opportunity to extend full stack automation efforts to include network devices as well.
Capabilities
Ansible’s network support augments, rather than replaces, network operations team capabilities. The network modules focus on three key areas where automation can revolutionize how organizations work with their network gear:
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Configuration Management
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Test-Driven Networking
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Continuous Compliance
Background
We built a set of Continue reading
Don’t let DROWN get you down
If you’re maintaining services on the internet, you know about the importance of keeping up to date with security patches as they come available. Today is no exception with the release of CVE-2016-0800, describing the ‘DROWN’ vulnerability in OpenSSL.
The key points of DROWN are that it can allow for passive decryption of encrypted traffic, via vulnerabilities in the obsolete SSLv2 protocol. Merely using SSLv2 for one service could cause the compromise the traffic of other services, even if they aren’t using SSLv2. More information can be found at http://www.drownattack.com/.
The Red Hat specific announcement can be found in the Red Hat Knowledgebase.
Obviously, this is a big deal, but patching your systems for DROWN doesn’t have to be a big deal, thanks to Ansible.
Here’s a sample playbook for Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS and Debian/Ubuntu systems (link to source):
- hosts: all gather_facts: true sudo: true tasks: - name: update openssl from apt if available apt: name=openssl state=latest update_cache=yes when: ansible_os_family == 'Debian' notify: restart_system - name: update openssl from yum if available yum: name=openssl state=latest update_cache=yes when: ansible_os_family == 'RedHat' notify: restart_system Continue reading
Galaxy 2.0.1 Release
Today we are pleased to announce the release of Galaxy 2.0.1. In this release we fixed a few nagging bugs, improved the UI on the My Roles page, and took steps to make the role import process more reliable.
Here’s a rundown of the issues addressed in this release:
130 - Plural for ‘minutes ago’ is currently ‘minutess ago’
129 - When Travis notifies on a new tag, tag is not imported into Galaxy
126 - Search - make keyword search less fuzzy
123 - Edit role name changes shouldn’t result in broken links
122 - Edit role name changes should be reflected on import roles page
119 - Search on Browse Authors results in 500 error
117 - Duplication in roles list
115 - An error occurred while saving the role: value too long for type character varying(256)
114 - Link to Travis-CI not loading
113 - Move user repository refresh task to separate queue
109 - Role listed multiple (2) times
107 - My Roles not displaying all roles
105 - Users have to refresh browser cache to get new CSS
AnsibleFest London 2016 Presentations
We broke records last week with over 500 people attending AnsibleFest London last week. If you were able to attend, we hope you enjoyed the event and will come again in 2017. If you couldn't attend, don't worry, we plan on 2 more events this year.
Follow Ansible on Twitter to get the latest news and details.
Deploying a Mesos Based Visual Effects Studio, Industrial Light and Magic
Continuous Deployment for an Order System, Atlassian
Ansible 2.0 and Windows, M*Modal
Ansible Accelerates Deployment at Societe Generale, Theodo
Managing Your Cisco Data Center Network with Ansible, Cisco
Immutable Infrastructure at Scale with Ansible, Beamly
View all of the presentations here.
Another Good Year for Ansible Users
It seems like just yesterday that we were putting together the recap of Ansible's community growth in 2014. That was a very good year.
Here we are at the start of 2016 already -- and looking back on 2015, it was an even better year than 2014 was.
First, let's take a look at the numbers. For consistency's sake, we'll mostly compare to 2014 numbers, which can be found in last year's analysis. Note that the same caveats from last year's analysis also apply this year.
Debian Popcon
Debian’s Popularity Contest is an opt-in way for Debian users to share information about the software they’re running on their systems. Although it represents only a small sample of the Linux distro world, it’s useful because it’s one of the few places where we can really see an apples-to-apples comparison of install bases of the various tools. Because Ansible is agentless, we compare the Ansible package to the server packages of other configuration management tools.
For the first time in 2015, Ansible installations on this chart outnumbered Puppetmaster installations. Ansible shows continued strong growth, and appears to remain on an upward trend into 2016.
Caveats abound with this chart, but it does Continue reading
Another Good Year for Ansible Users
It seems like just yesterday that we were putting together the recap of Ansible's community growth in 2014. That was a very good year.
Here we are at the start of 2016 already -- and looking back on 2015, it was an even better year than 2014 was.
First, let's take a look at the numbers. For consistency's sake, we'll mostly compare to 2014 numbers, which can be found in last year's analysis. Note that the same caveats from last year's analysis also apply this year.
Debian Popcon
Debian’s Popularity Contest is an opt-in way for Debian users to share information about the software they’re running on their systems. Although it represents only a small sample of the Linux distro world, it’s useful because it’s one of the few places where we can really see an apples-to-apples comparison of install bases of the various tools. Because Ansible is agentless, we compare the Ansible package to the server packages of other configuration management tools.
For the first time in 2015, Ansible installations on this chart outnumbered Puppetmaster installations. Ansible shows continued strong growth, and appears to remain on an upward trend into 2016.
Caveats abound with this chart, but it does Continue reading
Speaker Lineup for AnsibleFest London
Featuring speakers from Industrial Light and Magic, Atlassian, Cisco and more!
We're happy to share our speaker lineup for AnsibleFest London on Thursday, February 18th at InterContinental London - The O2. Our one-day user conference brings together hundreds of Ansible users, developers and industry partners to share best-practices, case studies and Ansible news.
With yet another record setting amount of submissions, our engineering team had their work cut out for them. We took each submission, anonymized them to remove any speaker/company/product information, and sent them off to our team of engineers for blind review. We then picked out a well-rounded agenda from the highest scoring talks.
Stay tuned for additional speakers announcements leading up to the event.
Deploying a Mesos Based Visual Effects Studio with Ansible
Aaron Carey, Production Engineer, Industrial Light and Magic
Jim Vanns, Senior Production Engineer, Industrial Light and Magic
Industrial Light and Magic is leveraging Ansible to deploy a Mesos cluster from scratch on multiple cloud platforms, build its application docker images and deploy them as services. This presentation will look at how ILM is using tags to manage services dynamically, and the steps taken to make it work across different cloud providers.
Speaker Lineup for AnsibleFest London
Featuring speakers from Industrial Light and Magic, Atlassian, Cisco and more!
We're happy to share our speaker lineup for AnsibleFest London on Thursday, February 18th at InterContinental London - The O2. Our one-day user conference brings together hundreds of Ansible users, developers and industry partners to share best-practices, case studies and Ansible news.
With yet another record setting amount of submissions, our engineering team had their work cut out for them. We took each submission, anonymized them to remove any speaker/company/product information, and sent them off to our team of engineers for blind review. We then picked out a well-rounded agenda from the highest scoring talks.
Stay tuned for additional speakers announcements leading up to the event.
Deploying a Mesos Based Visual Effects Studio with Ansible
Aaron Carey, Production Engineer, Industrial Light and Magic
Jim Vanns, Senior Production Engineer, Industrial Light and Magic
Industrial Light and Magic is leveraging Ansible to deploy a Mesos cluster from scratch on multiple cloud platforms, build its application docker images and deploy them as services. This presentation will look at how ILM is using tags to manage services dynamically, and the steps taken to make it work across different cloud providers.
Ansible Galaxy 2.0 Launches
Here’s a quick run-down:
Organizations
There really should be a drum roll playing as you read this, because this feature has been at the top of everyone’s wish list for as long as Galaxy has been around. But here it is… Organizations now have a home in Galaxy. Yes, you can import roles into an organization!
How, you ask? Just click the import button. Really. That’s it. The role will be imported exactly as the repository appears in GitHub. If the role belongs to ‘acmeco’ in GitHub, then it will appear under ‘acmeco’ in Galaxy.
You can import any repositories from GitHub where you are a collaborator or owner. Log in as yourself, and import your roles or your organization’s roles.
Existing roles prior to Galaxy 2.0 have not been changed. To move a role from your username to an organization, delete the role and import it again.
Semantic URLs
Sharing links to your content in Galaxy now makes sense with user-friendly URLs that include GitHub username or organization and Continue reading
Ansible Galaxy 2.0 Launches
Here’s a quick run-down:
Organizations
There really should be a drum roll playing as you read this, because this feature has been at the top of everyone’s wish list for as long as Galaxy has been around. But here it is… Organizations now have a home in Galaxy. Yes, you can import roles into an organization!
How, you ask? Just click the import button. Really. That’s it. The role will be imported exactly as the repository appears in GitHub. If the role belongs to ‘acmeco’ in GitHub, then it will appear under ‘acmeco’ in Galaxy.
You can import any repositories from GitHub where you are a collaborator or owner. Log in as yourself, and import your roles or your organization’s roles.
Existing roles prior to Galaxy 2.0 have not been changed. To move a role from your username to an organization, delete the role and import it again.
Semantic URLs
Sharing links to your content in Galaxy now makes sense with user-friendly URLs that include GitHub username or organization and Continue reading
2016: The Tipping Point for DevOps
Ahhh, a new year.
While 2015 was certainly a big year for us as we joined the Red Hat family, in many ways we’re still right at home with our roots deeply planted in the ways of open source. That means we’re listening (as we always do) to our customers and community members about what what they see as their problems to solve and goals to achieve in the year ahead.
Here’s a bit of what we see:
-
DevOps! It’s everywhere! If ever there was a buzzword to officially deserve the “jumped the shark” label, this might just be it. General understanding of DevOps as a practice that can potentially accelerate IT project delivery has permeated most IT departments, from the smallest of businesses to the most daunting of large enterprises, sometimes from the grassroots level, and sometimes from the top down.
-
Thankfully, along with this recognition, people are increasingly recognizing that DevOps isn’t simply tools -- that building a healthy organizational culture is a significant part of their journey. Many organizations are beginning to recognize that it’s not a lightswitch, or a flat-out reorg. The idea that small wins can matter when bringing DevOps practices into your Continue reading
2016: The Tipping Point for DevOps
Ahhh, a new year.
While 2015 was certainly a big year for us as we joined the Red Hat family, in many ways we’re still right at home with our roots deeply planted in the ways of open source. That means we’re listening (as we always do) to our customers and community members about what what they see as their problems to solve and goals to achieve in the year ahead.
Here’s a bit of what we see:
-
DevOps! It’s everywhere! If ever there was a buzzword to officially deserve the “jumped the shark” label, this might just be it. General understanding of DevOps as a practice that can potentially accelerate IT project delivery has permeated most IT departments, from the smallest of businesses to the most daunting of large enterprises, sometimes from the grassroots level, and sometimes from the top down.
-
Thankfully, along with this recognition, people are increasingly recognizing that DevOps isn’t simply tools -- that building a healthy organizational culture is a significant part of their journey. Many organizations are beginning to recognize that it’s not a lightswitch, or a flat-out reorg. The idea that small wins can matter when bringing DevOps practices into your Continue reading
Ansible 2.0 Has Arrived
After a year of work, we are extremely proud to announce that Ansible 2.0 has been released and is now generally available. This is by far one of the most ambitious Ansible releases to date, and it reflects an enormous amount of work by the community, which continues to amaze me. Approximately 300 users have contributed code to what has been known as “v2” for some time, and 500 users have contributed code to modules since the last major Ansible release.
Why Did We Start V2?
There are many pitfalls to refactoring software, so why did we decide to tackle such a major project? At the time we started the work on v2, Ansible was approximately three years old and had recently crossed the 1,000 contributor mark. This huge rate in growth also resulted in a degree of technical debt in the code, which was beginning to show as we continued to add features.
Ultimately, we decided it was worth it to take a step back and rework some aspects of the codebase which had been prone to having features bolted on without a clear-cut architectural vision. We also rewrote from scratch much of the code which was responsible Continue reading
Ansible 2.0 Has Arrived
After a year of work, we are extremely proud to announce that Ansible 2.0 ("Over the Hills and Far Away") has been released and is now generally available. This is by far one of the most ambitious Ansible releases to date, and it reflects an enormous amount of work by the community, which continues to amaze me. Approximately 300 users have contributed code to what has been known as “v2” for some time, and 500 users have contributed code to modules since the last major Ansible release.
Why Did We Start V2?
There are many pitfalls to refactoring software, so why did we decide to tackle such a major project? At the time we started the work on v2, Ansible was approximately three years old and had recently crossed the 1,000 contributor mark. This huge rate in growth also resulted in a degree of technical debt in the code, which was beginning to show as we continued to add features.
Ultimately, we decided it was worth it to take a step back and rework some aspects of the codebase which had been prone to having features bolted on without a clear-cut architectural vision. We also rewrote from scratch much Continue reading
Top Posts of 2015
As an eventful 2015 draws to a close we wanted to take a look back at the top posts of 2015.
Red Hat Acquires Ansible, The Open Source It Automation Company.
The title should come as no surprise, as many have predicted such an acquisition in the past. The similar open source ideologies, the technology fit, the executive team's open source background and the rapid adoption of Ansible in the enterprise certainly draw parallels to the world's leader in open source technology.
What was once a prediction is now reality, in just a little more than two years since Ansible, Inc., opened its doors, and we are thrilled! READ MORE
Managing VMware vSphere Guests With Ansible Tower
There are lots of ways to enable self-service VMs within an organisation - what some might call 'a private cloud'. However, these usually require layers and layers of complex software. What if you could leverage your existing hypervisor and 15 lines of code to do the same? And what if those 15 lines became an even simpler single click?
Ansible Core contains a module for managing virtual machines in VMware vSphere environments called vsphere_guest. Using this one module we can talk Continue reading
Top Posts of 2015
As an eventful 2015 draws to a close we wanted to take a look back at the top posts of 2015.
Red Hat Acquires Ansible, The Open Source It Automation Company.
The title should come as no surprise, as many have predicted such an acquisition in the past. The similar open source ideologies, the technology fit, the executive team's open source background and the rapid adoption of Ansible in the enterprise certainly draw parallels to the world's leader in open source technology.
What was once a prediction is now reality, in just a little more than two years since Ansible, Inc., opened its doors, and we are thrilled! READ MORE
Managing VMware vSphere Guests With Ansible Tower
There are lots of ways to enable self-service VMs within an organisation - what some might call 'a private cloud'. However, these usually require layers and layers of complex software. What if you could leverage your existing hypervisor and 15 lines of code to do the same? And what if those 15 lines became an even simpler single click?
Ansible Core contains a module for managing virtual machines in VMware vSphere environments called vsphere_guest. Using this one module we can Continue reading