AWS re:Invent re:cap

What a week. Some tech conferences I like, and others I love. Falling solidly in my "love" category, the Amazon team pulled off another great event with re:Invent 2015. Of course, the AWS product folks didn’t disappoint, either. (And neither did surprise re:Play party guest Zedd.)

We welcomed many hundreds of visitors to our booth during the three days. Over 200 shirts, many more Ansibulls, and every single sticker, luggage tag, and business card were gobbled up by excited Ansible users and Tower customers.

Perhaps the most entertaining part was to learn what people had to say:

No Bull. Just Swag.

We're over-the-moon excited to announce the Ansible online store is live. In response to all of the love you've shown us, we had to step up our swag game. The Ansible Store carries a variety of our best items, and we can't wait to see you showing off your Ansible pride. 

You can find your all-time favorites, like t-shirts, mugs and stickers. Plus, we've added a few exciting new items, like Ansible + Patagonia backpacks and onesies for our youngest fans.

For now we're only shipping throughout the United States while we get up and running. For our international friends, we'll expand shipment in the future. Stay tuned. 

Don't be surprised when you don't see our lovable Ansi-bull on the site. You'll need to attend a meetup or spot us at an event for one of those. 

So what are you waiting for? Start shopping and join the A team. 

Feature Spotlight: System Tracking

During the second installment of our webinar series about Ansible Tower features, we highlighted system tracking, a functionality which was just added to Tower with our 2.2. release.

System Tracking was created to give administrators the necessary tools to audit and verify that machines are in compliance. Use the tool to see how a machine has changed over time, or compare machines in your cluster to see how they are different.

For example, you may need to determine whether a set of machines had a security patch applied, or determine when a patch was applied. The System Tracking tools can help you do that. They can also help you evaluate your infrastructure for compliance against specific requirements, and periodically examine machines for unexpected changes.

When you run a scan, you’ll be able to see packages, services, and Ansible facts side-by-side for comparison. All differences in Ansible facts are highlighted in red for easy reference.

You can also expand this function by writing your own Ansible module that gathers the custom facts you want to see. Simply implement a module that returns the “ansible_facts” key, as described in the Ansible documentation.

Our goal with system tracking was to empower you Continue reading

Ansible + AWS: Re-Inventing Cloud Automation

Amazon Web Services and Ansible together make a great pair. AWS is a popular cloud target for Ansible users, and the reasons are clear: Ansible offers built-in support for over 20 different AWS capabilities with 50 different easy-to-use and understand Ansible modules. And as always, from on-premise to cloud, you can automate 100% of your infrastructure without ever installing an agent.

The takeaway? If your IT organizations is serious about AWS, then it needs to be serious about Ansible automation.

Come visit Ansible in booth 439 at re:Invent 2015 to learn how customers are using the Ansible automation platform to re-invent how they’re managing their cloud applications. Whether you’re just dipping your toe into the cloud, or are already running a fully-automated devops-enabled environment, Ansible is the key to unlocking the full benefit of moving to the cloud.

Connect with our team at the show:

If you’re new to Ansible, this is your opportunity to hit us with whatever questions you have about how Continue reading

Your Ansible Playbook for OpenStack Summit Tokyo

The next OpenStack Summit is quickly approaching -- and the schedule is, as always, packed with great sessions, collaboration days, social events, get-togethers, and more.

If you’re joining the event in Tokyo, which runs from October 27-30, and you’re a fan of Ansible, you just might be thinking to yourself… “If only there was a playbook for this!”

Behold! My amazing psychic capabilities alerted me to this exact scenario. Okay, not really, but: in, ahem, "playbook-inspired" format, you’ll find a list of tasks for each type of role -- conference sessions, OpenStack projects using Ansible to know about, the Ansible Collaboration Day onsite at Summit, and how to stay up to date with Ansible-related happenings on-site and beforehand.

Not familiar with Ansible yet, or how it works with OpenStack? Here's the great news: There will be plenty of opportunities for you to learn all about it at OpenStack Summit. And just like Ansible makes it easy for you to deploy and operate your OpenStack cloud -- this blog post makes it easy for you to find the Ansible-related content to get you started on your path to Ansible+OpenStack cloud bliss.

All you have to do is decide which Continue reading

Getting to Know John Ryan, Business Development & Channels

 

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're happy to introduce you to John Ryan, who joined Ansible as head of business development and channels. John has more than 30 years of experience in business development, channels, sales and marketing in infrastructure software, open source and network security. He’s held leadership positions at Proofpoint, Apigee, Red Hat, IBM and Sun Microsystems.  John holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University.

Tower 2.3 Has Arrived

We’re happy to announce the release of Ansible Tower 2.3, our console and service that brings control, security, and delegation to your Ansible deployments.

Historically Tower has been installed with a simple setup playbook that you run with the Ansible you already have to download and install Tower. But not everyone has the luxury of access to the internet at all times.

Starting with Tower 2.3, we now offer a bundled installer for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS systems. This all-in-one installer contains everything you need to get Tower started in one bundle, including bootstrapping of Ansible for you as needed. All you need is a Red Hat or CentOS machine with access to the vendor OS repositories - no other external access required. The playbook installer is still available as well, and Tower is also still available via Vagrant image or AMI if you’d prefer to try it via that method.

As usual, this release of Tower includes a variety of bug fixes as well, including performance improvements around listing jobs and job templates.

For more information on Tower 2.3, check the release notes at: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible-tower/latest/html/installandreference/release_notes.html

To try Ansible Tower 2.3 Continue reading

Ansible + AWS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and JBOSS

Many of the questions we frequently get are related to deploying applications and stacks into Amazon Web Services. Back in July, Ansible Government teamed up with partner DLT Solutions to host a webcast demonstrating the creation of a Red Hat stack in AWS entirely managed with Ansible. Watch it now and continue reading below for more information.

IT organizations look toward AWS for a number of reasons, but according to IDC, deploying applications in AWS results in a 64% lower TCO and 82% less downtime. Now let’s be honest. Who doesn’t like less downtime?

Red Hat is the leading Open Source provider for infrastructure and middleware solutions. Their industry-standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss middleware are widely deployed in on-prem physical and virtual environments, and are the benchmark for stability, security, and performance.

But how can you leverage that power in AWS? With Ansible, it’s easy.

In the webcast, we demonstrate the deployment of a complete JAVA-based web application, including RHEL, JBOSS, and a load balancer. Once installed, we demonstrated how to use the same playbook that deployed the application to update the application. Better yet, these examples are available for you to start using and experimenting with today.

Here’s Continue reading

Easily provision Windows instances in AWS with Ansible

MYTH: using Ansible to do fully-automated provisioning of Windows instances in AWS is difficult, because WinRM is not enabled by default on Amazon’s Windows AMIs, and the admin password is not known at startup.

Simplicity – the art of automation

Make Your Life Easier by Creating Utilities and Delegating Playbooks

Last week we hosted our second session of the Tips & Tricks webinar series and focused on creating utilities and delegating playbooks. We want to make your life easier by helping you to automate tasks and then delegate the execution. Ansible is not a programming language, but you can use it as one. Here’s what you need to know…

#1 Create executables that someone else can use

Leverage the shebang (#!) and use ansible as you would any scripting language to create utilities that can reuse your existing playbooks, roles and task lists.

#2 Use permissions to segment access

Unix permissions (and ACLs) can be used to restrict access to inventory and to the users/keys needed to access the defined hosts. You can also restrict which utilities can be executed (sudo).

#3 Use Ansible to make ad-hoc systems

Ansible is a Unix tool, as such it can be combined with others (cron, incron, netcat, ucspi, etc) to create automated workflows.

Watch the entire webinar now.

If you missed Brian's first Tips & Tricks session on Live Systems, you can watch it here. 

Next up is Tips & Tricks: QA on September 17, at 3PM Eastern. Register now and Continue reading

Uncontaina-bull: The love for Ansible + Docker

Here at Ansible, we normally leave it up to our good friend @Ansibull to deploy the puns. But having just joined Ansible in the past few weeks, I’ve been spending some time getting acquainted with the vast quantity of Ansible resources produced by the lovely folks in the community, and I have to say, the amount of great content out there is just…

In-cow-cula-bull.

This is especially great for those of us looking how to do Ansible + $justaboutanything: Ansible + OpenStack, Ansible + Drupal, Ansible + CoreOS, or, as you may have guessed, Ansible + Docker.

Of course, Ansible has some useful resources for how to use Docker with Ansible. But the beautiful thing about what all of our friends in the community are writing is that they’re sharing all the things they learned along the way, how it helped out their company or workplace, what puzzles they had to solve; basically, things you may run into yourself, or ideas that may be inspiring to you that you hadn’t thought of just yet.

And to not share those things with everyone else? That would be, ahem, unthinka-bull. So without further ado: Here’s just a little bit of the latest Continue reading

6 Things You (Maybe) Don’t Know About Ansible

Ansible is a very flexible and extensible automation tool, and it can be used in a lot of different environments that may not fit your preconceived notions of Ansible as an SSH-based tool to configure Linux and Unix systems. Here are a few other things you can do with Ansible, and a few ways to further customize and configure how your automation works. I hope these tips are useful! If you have any of your own to share, feel free to send us a tweet @ansible!

1. Ansible can be used to manage more than just servers

Most Ansible playbooks are used to configure and manage servers. Web servers, database servers, and so on. But anything with an SSH interface or an API can be managed with Ansible, too. For example we have modules to talk to cloud platforms, Citrix NetScaler and F5 load balancers, and other networking equipment. These modules are really helpful for tasks like multi-server rolling upgrades or other complicated orchestration tasks that need coordination with your broader networking environment.

You can also implement custom connection plugins for those really weird or legacy devices. There are a number of lesser-known ones shipped with Ansible, including Continue reading

A New Galaxy

We launched Galaxy back around the beginning of 2014 with the intent of creating a place for the community to find and share Ansible roles.

Since that time some truly amazing things have happened including: tremendous growth in the Ansible community, huge successes with Tower, and the steady growth of our company to name just a few. During this time Galaxy grew as well, reaching more than 16,000 users and over 3,000 Ansible roles.

Galaxy as a web site and an application, however, changed very little since the early part of 2014. The home page looks almost exactly as it did the day we launched the site. About the only thing we changed was removing the BETA label and maybe fixing a bug or two.

Well, I’m happy to announce that this is changing. Galaxy will now get the attention it deserves - the attention our community and users deserve. Starting 4 weeks ago we officially made the decision and commitment to treat Galaxy as a product. Galaxy is now on a regular release schedule, and we have a team in place, dedicated to building Galaxy. Our first release launches today. Yay!

From this point forward Ansible is committed to making Continue reading

Deploy to Metal? No sweat with RackN new Ansible Dynamic Inventory API

At Ansible, we’ve been talking quite a bit with our friends at RackN about the work they’ve been doing to make things easier to stand up complex system configurations from bare metal. We’re happy to share some of what they’ve accomplished.

Deploy to Metal? No sweat with RackN new Ansible Dynamic Inventory API: by Greg DeK + Dan Choquette

The RackN team takes our already super easy Ansible integration to a new level with added SSH Key control and dynamic inventory with the recent OpenCrowbar v2.3 (Drill) release. These two items make full metal control more accessible than ever for Ansible users.

The platform offers full key management.  You can add keys at the system, deployment (group of machines) and machine levels. These keys are operator settable and can be added and removed after provisioning has been completed.  If you want to control access to groups on a servers or group of server basis, OpenCrowbar provides that control via our API, CLI and UI.

We also provide a API path for Ansible dynamic inventory.  Using the simple Python client script (reference example), you can instantly a complete upgraded node inventory of your system.  The inventory data includes items Continue reading

NGINX and Ansible

Kevin Jones (@WebOpsX) wrote a nice post over on the NGINX blog about installing NGINX and NGINX Plus with Ansible.

One of my favorite features of Ansible is that it is completely clientless. To manage a system, a connection is made over SSH, using either Paramiko (a Python library) or native OpenSSH. Another attractive feature of Ansible is its extensive selection of modules. These modules can be used to perform some of the common tasks of a system administrator. In particular, they make Ansible a powerful tool for installing and configuring any application across multiple servers, environments, and operating systems, all from one central location.

Here are a few NGINX Ansible Galaxy Roles

https://galaxy.ansible.com/list#/roles/466

https://galaxy.ansible.com/list#/roles/551

https://galaxy.ansible.com/list#/roles/471

https://galaxy.ansible.com/list#/roles/1580

Read the full post here: Installing NGINX and NGINX Plus With Ansible

Getting to Know Robyn Bergeron, Community Architect at Ansible

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're happy to introduce you to Robyn Bergeron, who recently joined Ansible as a Community Architect. Her prior role was as a Developer Advocate at Elastic, where she worked closely with the ELK stack community. And many of us at Ansible know her from her days at Red Hat, where she was the Fedora Project Leader -- a role that her illustrious boss once himself had.

What’s your role at Ansible?

Open source communities work best when contributors are empowered and enabled to make things happen; the easier it is to contribute, the more likely they’ll continue to do so, and enjoy doing it. As a community architect, it’s my job to ensure that contributors, both long-time and new, are connected with the opportunities, ideas, tools, and people to make great things happen in the Ansible community, with minimal bureaucracy.

A good deal of my focus will Continue reading

How To Do DevOps Without Leaving Legacy Behind

An increasingly apparent and large challenge in IT organizations is how teams can effectively modernize software development and IT operations while still operating and maintaining legacy infrastructure. Often the approach is to merely draw a line in the sand, creating an arbitrary cut-off whereby new implementations make use of the much desired DevOps and Agile methodology.

But what about the legacy environments?

Just because something is “legacy” doesn’t automatically mean that it’s twenty years old. Many so-called legacy systems were deployed mere months ago-- and on modern hardware, operating systems, and storage. For the sake of an agile organization, however, a legacy deployment or environment is anything that is not included in the new processes and approaches required for a DevOps-enabled organization.

The question remains: how can IT organizations successfully apply DevOps and Agile methodologies to existing legacy environments, and what are the benefits from doing this?

Start with the Infrastructure

Regardless of the type and variety of applications in an enterprise IT environment, there are likely many commonalities in the operating system and infrastructure components.

Manual OS build processes typically require significant admin-hours to deliver a single build. Additionally, the reliability of the result is a totally dependent Continue reading

First Look: AnsibleFest San Francisco 2015

We are happy to announce that AnsibleFest will be returning to San Francisco this November. After a sell-out AnsibleFest in New York City, we have moved the West Coast event to an even larger location. 

If you are new to Ansible, AnsibleFest is a day-long conference bringing together hundreds of Ansible users, developers and industry partners to share best-practices, case studies and Ansible news. AnsibleFest is for anyone who is passionate (or becoming passionate) about Ansible.

Attendees include DevOps engineers, operations engineers, open source fans, systems engineers, system administrators, operations staff, release engineers, DBAs, network engineers and security professionals.

Again, we are offering Super Early Bird pricing for just $275 a ticket through August 31st. Don't miss out as we are only offering a limited number of Super Early Bird tickets at this time.

We are also accepting speaker applications here.

Here is a sample of what to expect at AnsibleFest San Francisco 2015.

See all of the presentations here.

How We Chose MongoDB for Ansible Tower System Tracking Feature

System Tracking

This is not a generic “Postgres vs. MongoDB” performance post. This post details the process of comparing Postgres vs. MongoDB with a particular use case in mind, System Tracking.

Desirable Databases Features

Postgres is a candidate database since it is already in use by Tower. MongoDB is the other database considered for an in depth analysis for many reasons including: (1) document store of the JSON structure, (2) arbitrary structure query support, (3) and the ability to run on a single machine and later scale.

Comparing the two databases begins with identifying our System Tracking requirements. What is System Tracking?

For Tower, System Tracking is time based snapshots of machine facts. Facts are key value pairs of system state. The inspiration comes from the open source Ansible. Ansible facts will be supported in System Tracking along with 3 other fact types: packages (i.e. rpm or apt-get), services (i.e. mongodb, apache2), and files (i.e. /var/log/message). We support these 3 facts as fact modules. We also want to allow for customer built modules. Facts generated by the 4 core modules plus user created modules would be stored in Tower’s System Tracking database; allowing customers to take advantage Continue reading