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AnsibleFest NYC 2015

AnsibleFest_NYC_2015

We are in the planning stages of our next stop in the AnsibleFest 2015 tour. We had a our biggest turnout ever at AnsibleFest London and know that our New York event will be even bigger and better!

AnsibleFest NYC is currently scheduled for late May/early June in NYC.

Details are being finalized now and tickets will go on sale soon.

If you are interested in speaking please email [email protected]

If you are interested in sponsoring please email [email protected] 

 

Enabling and Mounting NFS on CoreOS

I’ve written about CoreOS a fair amount (see here, here, and here), but one of the things that is both good and bad about CoreOS is the automatic update mechanism. It’s good because you know your systems will stay up to date, but it’s bad if you haven’t taken the time to properly address how automatic updates will affect your environment (for example, you’ve manually started some Docker containers instead of using systemd unit files—when the CoreOS system reboots after an update, your Docker containers will no longer be running). Re-architecting your environment to fully account for this change in architecture and behavior is a larger discussion than can be addressed in a single blog post, but in this post I want to at least tackle one small part of the discussion: separating your persistent data. In this post, I’ll show you how to mount an NFS share on a CoreOS instance deployed on OpenStack (or any cloud that leverages cloud-init).

Now, you could probably go into your CoreOS instance and manually make these changes, but that’s still thinking the old way. In addition to thinking about keeping persistent data separate, we (data center/cloud architects) also need Continue reading

Presentations in Markdown Using Deckset

Over the past couple of years, Markdown has become an important part of my computing landscape. I’ve transitioned almost all of my text-based content creation, including this blog, over to Markdown. I’d also been looking for ways that I might be able to extend my use of Markdown into creating presentations as well, but hadn’t—until recently—found a tool that fit into my workflow. Then I started using Deckset.

The idea behind Deckset is not unique; there are other projects out there that do the same sort of thing. (Remarkjs is one example that I’ve also used; more on that in a moment.) You create your presentation in Markdown, using headings, bulleted lists, numbered lists, etc. Markdown is just plain text, so you can use any plain text editing tool you like for this part. Deckset itself is OS X-specific, but the content remains platform- and application-independent (use any text editing tool on any platform you like).

Because Markdown isn’t natively suited to creating presentations, Deckset—along with all the other solutions I tried—have to add some “extensions” to Markdown. For example, in Deckset’s case:

  • You’ll use three hyphens (---) to denote the start of a new slide.
  • Continue reading

Vagrant Box for Learning Open vSwitch

As you may have picked up from some of my recent posts, I’m focused on building content and tools that will help others learn new projects, products, and technologies that I think will be very relevant in the future. One such project is Open vSwitch (OVS), which I’ve written about quite a bit (you can see all OVS-related posts here). To help others work with and learn about Open vSwitch, I’ve published a new Vagrant base box.

(In the event you’re not familiar with Vagrant, take a look at this quick introduction.)

The new Vagrant box I’ve created is running Ubuntu 14.04.1 and has Open vSwitch 2.3.1—the latest available release—pre-installed. To install this Vagrant box for use in your Vagrant environments, simply run this command:

vagrant box add slowe/ubuntu-1404-x64-ovs

Vagrant will download and install the box. (Note that this box is formatted for the “vmware_desktop” provider, which means you’ll need VMware Fusion or VMware Workstation as well as the Vagrant plugin for VMware.) Once the box is installed on your system, then you can begin using it in a Vagrantfile by just referencing the box name. As with the other Vagrant boxes Continue reading

A Quick Thought About Mesos-DNS

A colleague recently pointed me to the recent Mesosphere announcement of Mesos-DNS, a DNS-based service discovery mechanism for Apache Mesos clusters. A comment made in the announcement got me thinking, and I wanted to briefly share my thoughts.

The comment that got me thinking was this:

Mesos-DNS is simple and stateless. Unlike Consul and SkyDNS, it does not require consensus mechanisms, persistent storage, or a replicated log.

If you’ve been following along here on my site, you know that I’ve written about Consul before (see here), and I have more Consul content planned. I’m reasonably familiar with Consul’s architecture and requirements. Likewise, although I haven’t specifically written about SkyDNS, it’s based on etcd, which I have talked about (see here). The Mesos-DNS article seems to imply that Mesos-DNS is somehow less complex than either of these two solutions because it doesn’t require consensus mechanisms, persistent storage, or a replicated log.

However, in my mind that’s a misleading statement. Yes, Consul does require a consensus mechanism (it uses Raft, like etcd). SkyDNS (as I understand it, at least) simply leverages etcd, so technically SkyDNS itself doesn’t require a consensus mechanism. And the assertion that SkyDNS itself Continue reading

Interview with Ansible CEO

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Ansible CEO Saïd Ziouani recently sat down for an interview with Adrian Bridgwater of ToolsAdvisor.net to talk about the past, present and future of Ansible. 

Tools Advisor: Ansible Tower is an opportunity for less technical users to get involved with IT automation by virtue of its role-based access control and dashboard functionality being core extras over and above the command line version of the open source product. Just exactly how 'non-technical' a user do you think should be involved here?
Saïd Ziouani: We strongly believe that IT Automation should be a dull task; your IP competency should be your priority and the main focus for your software developers. Managing your infrastructure must be simple to a point that it's almost boring. Tower takes the simplicity model of Ansible to a new level, allowing easy push button automation at scale, and team role delegation.

Read the full interview here.

Multi-Container Docker with YAML and Vagrant

In this post, I’ll provide an example of using YAML to create a multi-container Docker environment in Vagrant. I made a brief mention of this technique in my earlier post talking about how to use Docker with Vagrant, but wanted to provide an example. For me, I know that examples are often quite helpful when I’m learning something new. Since one of my primary goals here is to help enable others to learn these technologies, I figured an example would be helpful. So, to that end, here’s an example that I hope will help others.

As is becoming my custom, you can find resources to help you replicate this environment on your own laptop/desktop/whatever via my “learning-tools” GitHub repository.

Before I get into the details, I want to just very quickly recap some information from my earlier post on using Docker with Vagrant:

  • Vagrant has a built-in Docker provider (present since versioni 1.6).
  • Unless running on Linux, Vagrant will (by default) spin up an instance of a boot2docker VM on which to host the Docker containers. If you decide to modify this behavior (see the earlier post for full details), you’ll end up with a second Vagrantfile that Continue reading

Using Docker with Vagrant

As part of my ongoing effort to create tools to assist others in learning some of the new technologies out there, I spent a bit of time today working through the use of Docker with Vagrant. Neither of these technologies should be new to my readers; I’ve already provided quick introductory posts to both (see here and here). However, using these two together may provide a real benefit for users who are new to either technology, so I’d like to take a bit and show you how to use Docker with Vagrant.

Background

Vagrant first started shipping with a Docker provider as part of the core product in version 1.6 (recall that Vagrant uses the concept of providers to support multiple backend virtualization solutions). Therefore, if you’ve installed any recent version of Vagrant, you already have the Docker provider as part of your Vagrant installation.

However, while you may have the Docker provider as part of Vagrant, you still need Docker itself (just like if you have the VMware provider for Vagrant, you still need the appropriate VMware product—VMware Fusion on the Mac or VMware Workstation on Windows/Linux) in order to provide the functionality Vagrant will consume. Continue reading

Using Docker with Vagrant

As part of my ongoing effort to create tools to assist others in learning some of the new technologies out there, I spent a bit of time today working through the use of Docker with Vagrant. Neither of these technologies should be new to my readers; I’ve already provided quick introductory posts to both (see here and here). However, using these two together may provide a real benefit for users who are new to either technology, so I’d like to take a bit and show you how to use Docker with Vagrant.

Background

Vagrant first started shipping with a Docker provider as part of the core product in version 1.6 (recall that Vagrant uses the concept of providers to support multiple backend virtualization solutions). Therefore, if you’ve installed any recent version of Vagrant, you already have the Docker provider as part of your Vagrant installation.

However, while you may have the Docker provider as part of Vagrant, you still need Docker itself (just like if you have the VMware provider for Vagrant, you still need the appropriate VMware product—VMware Fusion on the Mac or VMware Workstation on Windows/Linux) in order to provide the functionality Vagrant will consume. Continue reading

Technology Short Take #48

Welcome to Technology Short Take #48, another installation in my irregularly-published series that collects links, articles, and thoughts from around the web. This time around, the content is a bit heavier on cloud management and applications/operating systems, but still lots of good content all the way around (I hope, anyway).

Networking

  • Matt Oswalt recently wrapped up his 3-part “DevOps for Networking” series. I referenced part 1 of the series back in TST #46, and parts 2 and 3 are just as good as the first one. Part 2 talks about source-driven configuration for NetOps (which discusses the use of Git and Gerrit to manage network device configurations), while Part 3 walks through a continuous integration pipeline for networking (which adds Jenkins to the mix described in part 2). Helpful and informative content, no question about it.
  • The NFV discussion seems to be heating up a bit, particularly the “networking” part of NFV. Craig Matsumoto of SDxCentral recently published a piece on NFV performance; that article was based largely on a blog post by Martin Taylor of Metaswitch found here. The key takeaway is that NFV networking performance requirements are something that projects like OpenStack and Open vSwitch (OVS) Continue reading

AnsibleFest London Presentations

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We had our biggest and best AnsibleFest last week in London! This was our 1st Ansible event outside of the United States and due to the amazing turnout and great crowd we will definitely include at least one stop overseas in 2016.

If you were not able to attend, or just wanted to see the presentations, we’ve compiled all of them here:

How to automate Big Data with Ansible - Marius Boeru, BigStep

Ansible and Vagrant - Sebastian Göttschkes, wogibtswas.at

The Devs Are Opsing (And It Isn’t Painful) - Ali Asad Lotia, Blue Newt

Ansible, Windows, and Powershell - Jon Hawkesworth, M Modal

How Rackspace Is Deploying OpenStack With Ansible - Walter Bentley, Rackspace

What's New in V2 - James Cammarata, Ansible

Ansible Internals - Brian Coca, Ansible


We’ll be announcing the next stop in the AnsibleFest tour soon (hint: It is New York City) so follow us on Twitter to find out all of the details first!

View our Ansible Tower Video here to learn all about the great features available in Ansible Tower.

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