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
Getting to Know Tim Cramer, VP of Engineering 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 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 Tim Cramer, VP of Engineering at Ansible. Tim brings over 20 years of enterprise software experience to Ansible. He was previously at HP where he was responsible for the overall delivery of Helion Eucalyptus Cloud, managing global teams of engineering, support and IT. He also worked as an executive at Dell, Eucalyptus, and Sun Microsystems, and as an engineer at Sun and Supercomputer Systems Inc.
What’s your role at Ansible?
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Running the development and release of Ansible Tower and managing the Ansible open source team and community efforts
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Scaling the engineering team and increasing the ability to release products more often and with higher quality
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Overseeing partner engineering integrations that benefit Ansible customers and users; for example, working on enhancing Windows, VMware, OpenStack, and AWS functionality
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Understanding and prioritizing the features for Tower releases
What’s your management philosophy?
My philosophy is not unlike the great Continue reading
The Wait is Over. Tower 2.2 Docs are Live.
While prior versions of the Ansible Tower documentation focused on a single PDF, we've gone in a different direction for this release. You will still have all of the great content available from earlier releases, but in a documentation set comprised of guides focused on getting you going, installation and reference, administration, and more. I have to say that all of the outstanding documentation that was created for prior versions gave me a strong foundation to work with for this release and I'm grateful for the hard work put in before I joined the Ansible team.
With Ansible Tower 2.2, we are ensuring that access to HTML as well as PDF versions of the Tower documents are easily available from the docs website. Our Ansible Tower HTML documents also look and feel more similar to the Ansible documentation available online that you've come to know and love. And, they've been indexed to help you find the information you need as quickly as possible.
First, we're introducing Ansible Tower to new users with our Quick Installation and Quick Setup Guides. These manuals are geared toward getting Ansible Tower installed and setup to the point of running a simple playbook. They Continue reading
Tower 2.2 is Here
We’re happy to announce that Ansible Tower 2.2 is now available.
Ansible Tower is the console and service that builds on the solid foundation of Ansible’s simple automation to bring the control, security, and delegation you need to spread automation across your IT infrastructure. We’ve worked hard to update Tower to bring new capabilities to our users. I’ve talked about these some when I discussed how Tower 2.2 was coming soon - now I’d like to go into a little more detail.
Refreshed UI with Setup Mode
We’ve talked to many of our customers who use Tower on an everyday basis. And the continuing refrain is:
“Foreground the stuff we need every day. Background what we don’t.”
We’ve started that process with Tower 2.2. First, you’ll notice the changes on the dashboard, where we’ve removed extraneous graphs so you can concentrate on the important information - are your hosts OK, and are your jobs succeeding. Plus, you’ll see lists of both recent completed jobs, and recently used playbooks.
We’ve also added sparklines to the display of job templates so that wherever you’re seeing your job templates, you have an easy visual display of how that job Continue reading
Ansible/AWS/Red Hat Webinar with DLT
The Federal Cloud First policy mandates that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing benefits to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost. But how can you safely and reliably begin to deploy and manage your Red Hat instances at cloud scale? With IT automation, you can more easily deploy and manage your Red Hat instances in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.
In this webinar, we’ll demonstrate how to:
- Automate the creation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based AWS instances
- Apply a security baseline to the instances
- Deploy and manage an application
Who Should Attend: Those in the public sector who are working to move to the cloud
Why Attend: Regardless of where you are in the cloud adoption process, leveraging IT automation can help smooth the transition to the cloud.
Presenter: Justin Nemmers, director public sector at Ansible
Date & Time: Thursday, July 23, at 2PM Eastern
Ansible June Training Recordings
If you haven't signed up for any of our FREE Ansible trainings or webinars, head over to our Webinar page to register today.
Training classes are free, held online and run approximately 2 hours and held on the 2nd (10am EST) and 4th (1pm EST) Thursday each month.
June Training Recordings
AnsibleFest NYC Networking Automation Panel
A few weeks ago at AnsibleFest in NYC, we did something a little bit different: we assembled a panel of networking experts and had a very interesting discussion about some of the challenges and opportunities around networking automation. With representatives from Cisco, Cumulus, World Wide Technologies, and Network to Code, we dug into some of the reasons to automate your network, the technical and organizational challenges, and we reviewed some of the new Ansible modules being written for various networking components. Network automation is an exciting and early area for us, and we are looking forward to what the future holds.
AnsibleFest NYC Video Presentations
AnsibleFest in NYC was an amazing day filled with everything Ansible. If you missed the presentations, we've compiled them all here.
Ansible Tower 2.2 … coming soon!
If you were at AnsibleFest NYC, you saw a sneak preview of Ansible Tower 2.2, coming this summer. For those of you that didn't, we thought we'd mention some of the things that are coming in the next release.
Ansible Tower remains the best way to run Ansible in your organization - marrying the simple, agentless, and powerful automation of Ansible with the control, security, and delegation you need to supercharge your IT teams ability to tackle complex automation tasks simply.
And we've worked to make Tower even better for you, bringing you new features like:
Streamlined Interface with Setup Mode
We've listened to our customers and foregrounded the things you need on a day to day basis.,Meanwhile, Tower’s new setup screen gathers all the parts of Tower the administrator needs to configure such as organizations, users, groups, and permissions, in one place.
Galaxy Integration
Just add a Galaxy requirements file to your project directory, and Tower will automatically pull any playbook roles you need from Ansible Galaxy, GitHub, or any other centralized source.
Inventory Support for OpenStack
Ansible is committed to help make OpenStack simple for everyone to use, and we've now made it simple to Continue reading
AnsibleFest Presentations
First, we'd like to thank EVERYONE who attended, was a sponsor, or just followed along online via the AnsibleFest hashtag. While we will have a more in-depth recap, which will include video, we wanted to make sure the speaker's slides were easily available to everyone.
From Ansible:
Bill Nottingham - Ansible Tower 2.2
James Cammarata - Ansible V2 and beyond
Brian Coca - Ansible Tips & Tricks
Alan Norton - Betterment - Cyansible
Walter Bentley - Rackspace - Operating Your Openstack Cloud Using Ansible
Irakli Nadareishvili - API Academy- Building a Docker-ized Microservice In Node, Using Ansible
No Hands on Keyboards
Be honest. How many of you are still logging directly into the systems that you administer, via SSH, and changing things? I am. It’s a hard habit to break, but it’s one worth breaking. Luckily I don’t have very many servers of my own to manage, but changing things manually, instead of modeling those things in a language of automation is a sure way to build up technical debt and regret it later.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done any sort of system administration as my day job. But I talk to Ansible customers on a daily basis, and I have seen all sorts of environments: simple, complicated, small, large, well-managed, and poorly-managed. But one constant that I see throughout is increasing complexity and scale. Even for small shops with a few users, today’s platforms for data management, cloud hosting, and containers require a lot more distinct machines under management for their operation than the good old days when a couple of bare-metal LAMP servers could run a full web application.
Many people have written about the exponential growth in computing: from the early days of mainframes hosting hundreds of users and applications, to a single server rack Continue reading
Ansible at IPEXPO: Simplicity – The Art of Automation
Ansible's Director of EMEA Business Development, Mark Phillips, presented at the recent IPEXPO. His talk Simplicity - The Art of Automation was recorded and he was able to combine the slides and the video.
IT infrastructures have grown in complexity over recent years as businesses seek every last competitive gain. Managing these complex infrastructures has become almost as complicated, but should it have? Could we actually gain more, by doing less?
#AnsibleFest NYC 2015 – Speaker Lineup
We’re proud to announce some of the speaker lineup for AnsibleFest NYC. 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.
Check out our line up of some of the sessions.
AnsibleFest is next Thursday, June 4th in NYC.
Register today as space is very limited.
Ansible v2, James Cammarata, Director of Engineering
A walk through of some of the new features and benefits in the 2.0 release.
Bio:
James Cammarata is a Director of Engineering at Ansible. He is the lead developer of Ansible, and has worked on tools such as Ansible and Cobbler in the past.
Twitter @thejimic
Ansible Tower 2.2, Bill Nottingham, Director of Product, Ansible
Everyone knows about Ansible’s simple, agentless, and powerful automation. (At least, we assume that’s why you’re here.) But sometimes you need more in your organization - you want to be able to find out what happened with your playbook run last week. You want to delegate your rollouts to the dev team, so you don’t have to do it.
We’ll show how Ansible Tower adds control, security, and delegation around Ansible. Plus, we’ll Continue reading
#Simple OpenStack Collaboration Day Recap
We were excited to announce our Simple OpenStack Initiative earlier this week which kicked off with our Collaboration Day in Vancouver at the OpenStack Summit.
The weather, the setting and the conference overall have been just fantastic. I wanted to recap some of the discussions we had in during our collaboration day as it was the perfect jumpstart to this already great week.
We had solid participation from across the board -– networking and hardware leaders, consultants, cloud providers, etc. -- and it reinforced to me how much interest there is in Ansible, and how many angles there are to consider while trying to remain true to our mission of simplicity.
Ansible’s goal is to help everyone move faster to make OpenStack more viable. We really don’t have a horse in the race; we are not in the business of betting on who will get there first, or better. We just want OpenStack to work, for all of us.
There were two high-level themes to the day -- undercloud and overcloud -- and lots of listening, learning and active discussions.
The Undercloud Discussion: OSAD and friends
Kevin Carter of Rackspace, PTL of the OS-Ansible-Deployment (OSAD) project, opened the day with Continue reading
The Ansible Basics: Why Automation Matters Today in IT
Your development team has completed weeks of work, delivering their masterpiece-an application-to IT for deployment, but it doesn’t work.
See, the developers made use of a different port, that now needs to be opened on the firewall so end users can communicate with the software. IT changed the firewall rule, but didn’t tell development, so they never even knew it was an issue. Later, they create another application with the same issue, except this time, it will be deployed in a different environment.
No procedure or policy was created to capture all of the changes necessary to successfully deploy the app, so the same thing happens again. It’s a vicious cycle.
IT departments struggle to manage thousands of configurations and hundreds of applications with everyone working in silos. Teams who develop the apps frequently are not on the teams that use them. Meanwhile, operations teams deploy apps they didn’t write and have to convey to the development team when changes need to be made in order for them to work in this new and foreign-to-development thing called "a production environment".
Sound familiar?
Today’s IT environments are extremely complex. In the past, applications and hardware were closely connected. Apps came from Continue reading
May Ansible Training Recording
We held another free Ansible Training session today. These trainings are held online and are scheduled twice a month. If you haven't attended one yet, please register here. The trainings are free, run about two hours and cover a number of Ansible basics.
Here is the recording from today's session:
Ansible Tower Now Available with Vagrant
Ansible is about simple, yet powerful automation. We want to make automation easy for everyone to learn, use, and deploy, for developers, system administrators, and operators of every skill level.
Every day we hear the success stories of people who have been able to take Ansible’s powerful automation and use it to cut their IT costs, stabilize their deployments, and allow them to get back to their focus of their job rather than continually grinding through manual tasks.
On top of that, we’ve built Ansible Tower, a web interface and API that brings those same simple principles to applying command, control, and delegation to an Ansible deployment. Customers like Nike, Splunk, Grainger, and others use Tower to centralize their Ansible deployment, delegate credentials and tasks to users in a controlled manner, and allow easy self-service access to users without them knowing the specifics of those automation.
We’re always interested in making things simpler for our users, and this extends to deploying and trying Tower as well. That’s why we’ve decided to make Tower available for use with Vagrant - what’s simpler than that?
You can try out Ansible Tower in Vagrant with just a few commands.
$ vagrant init tower
Ansible Collaboration Day at OpenStack Summit
OpenStack has long had a reputation for being difficult to install and manage. This reputation may be a bit overblown, but it's not entirely unwarranted.
The plain truth is that OpenStack has a lot of components, all of which must be working in concert to be successful. A simple misconfiguration in one component can lead to cascading failures throughout the system, which can then be difficult to diagnose and correct.
It's one of the essential problems of managing any distributed system: one must effectively manage both individual components (i.e. configuration) and the relationships between those components (i.e. orchestration).
Ansible is a simple tool that excels at both -- which helps to explain Ansible's surging popularity in the OpenStack ecosystem. Over the past year, several OpenStack projects have emerged to take full advantage of Ansible's power and simplicity.
We've been watching with great interest. Now we think it's time to get more directly involved.
On Monday, May 18th, we will hold an Ansible Collaboration Day at the OpenStack Summit. Our collective goal is simple and ambitious: to make the installation and management of OpenStack as simple as we can possibly make it.
The first part of the day will Continue reading
Special Ansible Tower Offer
To celebrate the release of O'Reilly's Ansible Up and Running: Automating Configuration Management and Deployment the Easy Way by Lorin Hochstein we are offering a special package for Ansible fans. Buy an Ansible Tower Starter Kit and get a physical copy of the book, 2 Ansible t-shirts, 2 Ansible hats, stickers, pins and an Ansibull.
To take advantage of this offer simply purchase an Ansible Tower Starter Kit here and enter ansiblefan at checkout. Offer expires on 6/5/15 or while supplies last. Quantities are limited so act fast.
*Offer available to NEW Ansible Tower customers only.
Ansible 1.9.1 Released
Ansible 1.9.1 fixes several bugs, including:
* Fixed a bug related to Kerberos auth when using winrm with a domain account.
* Fixing several bugs in the s3 module.
* Fixed a bug with upstart service detection in the service module.
* Fixed several bugs with the user module when used on OSX.
* Fixed unicode handling in some module situations (assert and shell/command execution).
* Fixed a bug in redhat_subscription when using the activationkey parameter.
* Fixed a traceback in the gce module on EL6 distros when multiple pycrypto installations are available.
* Added support for PostgreSQL 9.4 in rds_param_group
* Several other minor fixes.
As always, this update is available via PyPi and releases.ansible.com now, and packages for distros will be available as soon as possible.
