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Category Archives for "Systems"

First Look: AnsibleFest San Francisco 2015

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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.

Learn More About AnsibleFest San Francisco 2015

 

Your Docker Agenda for August

Excited for Docker Global Hack Day #3 and DockerCon 2015 Europe? Us too! As you wait for these bigger Docker events, you can participate in awesome Docker meetup events and attend other Docker talks and conferences happening globally. Below is your Docker agenda for … Continued

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

TimC_780x300Knowing 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?

  • Running the development and release of Ansible Tower and managing the Ansible open source team and community efforts

  • Scaling the engineering team and increasing the ability to release products more often and with higher quality

  • Overseeing partner engineering integrations that benefit Ansible customers and users; for example, working on enhancing Windows, VMware, OpenStack, and AWS functionality

  • Understanding and prioritizing the features for Tower releases

What’s your management philosophy?
My philosophy is not unlike the great Continue reading

Thank You SysAdmins!

With SysAdmin Day coming up on Friday, July 31st, now is a great time to thank our SysAdmins for everything they do! Without them, who knows what we would do when a server is down. For setting up servers, monitoring for stability, … Continued

Intro to Docker Webinar: Q&A

Many great questions popped up in this week’s Introduction to Docker webinar where we covered the basics of the Docker technology, discussed the Continuous Integration (CI) use case and a product demo of Docker Trusted Registry and Docker Engine. Instead of keeping … Continued

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.

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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

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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

New Apt and Yum Repos

written by Jessie Frazelle, Core Maintainer at Docker, Inc. TLDR; UPDATE your Docker apt repo source list if you want to be able to get the latest Docker We have a yum repo FINALLY for rpms EVERYONE GETS A DYNAMIC … Continued

Open Container Format Progress Report

Follow Up from Open Container Initiative (formerly Project) Announcement of 6/22 written by Michael Crosby, Chief Maintainer of Docker, Inc. Approximately one month ago, we announced the creation of the Open Container Initiative*, under the auspices of the Linux Foundation … Continued

Over 200 Docker Meetups!

Big thank you to our Docker community for the support in helping us grow to now over 200 Docker meetup groups! Without all of the Docker meetup organizers, sponsors, speakers and attendees, none of this would be possible – we are … Continued

Technology Short Take #52

Welcome to Technology Short Take #52, the latest collection of news, links, and articles from around the web on data center technologies.

Networking

  • Want to know a bit more about how OVN (Open Virtual Network) plans to integrate support for containers? See this. You might also find it useful to review this OVN presentation from the recent OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. A video recording of the presentation is also available on YouTube.
  • QualiSystems has a series of articles on open networking standards. A couple of the articles really jumped out at me—part 2 covers Open vSwitch, part 3 discusses OpenStack, part 4 discusses OpenFlow, and part 6 talks about OVSDB. There are also posts on OpenDaylight and OpFlex as well.
  • P4 is getting all the attention in the SDN world these days. What is P4? Craig Matsumoto has an overview at SDx Central; the “TL;DR” is that P4 is a high-level language aimed at describing how data plane devices process packets. If you want even more detail, then head over to the P4.org site for more information.
  • Jason Edelman, whose focus has been on network automation, recently posted an article on programming an ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure) Continue reading