Building a Fully Automated Ubuntu Installation Process
Recently on Twitter, I mentioned that I had managed to successfully create a fully automated process for installing Ubuntu Server 14.04.2, along with a method for bootstrapping Ansible. In this post, I’m going to describe the installation process I built and the components that went into making it work. I’ll discuss the Ansible bootstrap process in a separate post. I significantly doubt that there is anything new or unique here, but hopefully this information will prove helpful to others facing similar challenges.
Before I continue, allow me to briefly discuss why I didn’t use a system like Cobbler instead of putting together my own system. Cobbler is a great tool. For me, though, this was also about deepening my own knowledge. I wanted to better understand the various components involved and how they interacted, and I didn’t feel I would really be able to do that with a “prebuilt” system like Cobbler. If you are more interested in getting something up and running as opposed to learning more about how it works (and that’s OK), then I’d recommend you skip this post and go download Cobbler. If, on the other hand, you want to make this into more Continue reading
Docker Tutorial 10 – Docker Compose
This is a casual Docker tutorial series. We will start out first with very simple sessions on how to install and use the docker run command. In future videos we will hit more advanced topics. This tenth video … ContinuedNew Innovators Showcase @ DockerCon 2015
At this year’s DockerCon conference in San Francisco, we will be featuring six startups using Docker in our pilot New Innovators Showcase. This pilot program gives these early-stage startups a space to exhibit their work. This year’s New Innovators Showcase … ContinuedThe 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:
Simon Eskildsen from Shopify to Speak at DockerCon 2015
At last year’s DockerCon EU, Simon Eskildsen, Infrastructure Engineer at Shopify, presented a talk titled “From This-Looks-Fun to Production” that was one of our favorites from the conference. This year, Simon will present a talk on “Resilient Routing and Discovery” … ContinuedOnline Meetup recap: Docker Compose 1.2
Continuing our Docker Online meetup series centered on the Docker 1.6 release, we are pleased to share the video recording from Wednesday’s webinar with Aanand Prasad the lead maintainer of Compose. In this session, Aanand detailed new key features and the first step towards a Docker Compose / Swarm … ContinuedAdrian Cockcroft to Speak @ DockerCon 2015
In his keynote from DockerCon 2014 EU, Adrian Cockcroft (Technology Fellow at Battery Ventures and former Cloud Architect at Netflix) shares his thoughts on the future of microservices, summarizes the differences and commonalities across various microservices architectures and shows how they are evolving. Adrian’s … Continued5 Reasons Why You Should Attend DockerCon 2015
We have way more (and we’re sure you do too!), but here are our top five reasons to attend DockerCon 2015. 1. All-Star Lineup of Presenters We secured an all-star lineup featuring: Solomon Hykes, Founder and CTO of Docker Matthew Leventi, System Engineer … ContinuedDocker Tutorial 9 – Docker Machine
This is a casual Docker tutorial series. We started out first with very simple sessions on how to install and use the docker run command. In future videos we will hit more advanced topics. This ninth video talks about Docker … ContinuedAnsible 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
DockerCon 2015 Hackathon: Ready to Hack Docker?
The Docker team is organizing a 24-hour hackathon for the Docker community during the weekend before DockerCon 2015. Thanks to help from our sponsor Rancher Labs, this year’s DockerCon Hackathon will be our largest ever! Spots are limited for this … ContinuedUsing PXE with virt-install
In this post, I’ll just share a quick command that can be used to build and install a KVM guest using PXE instead of an ISO image. There’s nothing new here; this is just me documenting a command so that it’s easier for me (and potentially others) to find next time I need it.
I shared how to use the virt-install command to build KVM guest domains in a blog post talking about working with KVM guests. In that post, I used an ISO image with the virt-install command to build the guest domain.
However, there may be times when you would prefer to use PXE instead of an ISO image. To build a KVM guest domain and instruct the guest domain to boot via PXE, you would use this command (I’ve inserted backslashes and line returns to improve readability):
sudo virt-install --name=guest-name --ram=2048 --vcpus=1
--disk path=/var/lib/libvirt/images/guest-disk.qcow2,bus=virtio
--pxe --noautoconsole --graphics=vnc --hvm
--network network=net-name,model=virtio
--os-variant=ubuntuprecise
The key here is the --pxe parameter, which virt-install uses to instruct the guest domain to PXE boot instead of booting from a virtual CD-ROM backed by an ISO image.
Naturally, you’d want to substitute the desired values for the KVM Continue reading
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
Your Docker Agenda in May
April was quite an eventful month for the Docker Community. By the end of April, over 1,200 people attended the 24 birthday events organized by the Docker community in 11 countries. With the overwhelming number of contributions we received, we … ContinuedSpecial 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.
Online Meetup Recap: Docker Swarm 0.2.0
As you might already by now, we scheduled a series of Docker online meetups covering the updates included in the release of the latest versions of Docker Engine, Registry, Compose, Swarm, and Machine. Two weeks ago, Tibor Vass (core maintainer … ContinuedAnnouncing the 3rd Batch of DockerCon 2015 Speakers
Today, we’re excited to share with you the 3rd batch of speakers selected by the DockerCon Community Review Committee. We feel extremely fortunate to have such an amazing and diverse speaker lineup. From Docker use cases to DevOps culture talks and deep technical … ContinuedA Quick Introduction to LXD
With the recent release of Ubuntu 15.04, aka “Vivid Vervet”, the Ubuntu community has also unveiled an early release of LXD (pronounced “lex-dee”), a new project aimed at revitalizing the use of LXC and LXC-based containers in the face of application container efforts such as Docker and rkt. In this post, I’ll provide a quick introduction to LXD.
To make it easier to follow along with some of the examples of using LXD, I’ve created an lxd directory in my GitHub “learning-tools” repository. In that directory, you’ll find a Vagrantfile that will allow you to quickly and easily spin up one or more VMs with LXD.
Relationship between LXD and LXC
LXD works in conjunction with LXC and is not designed to replace or supplant LXC. Instead, it’s intended to make LXC-based containers easier to use through the addition of a back-end daemon supporting a REST API and a straightforward CLI client that works with both the local daemon and remote daemons via the REST API. You can get more information about LXD via the LXD web site. Also, if you’re unfamiliar with LXC, check out this brief introduction to LXC. Once you’ve read that, you can browse some Continue reading