Compliance and Automation Using Ansible
Compliance is a big deal in many industries, from e-commerce and PCI, to healthcare and HIPAA, to federal government and FedRAMP. At the core, compliance is all about making sure that IT systems are secure. The controls for the various industries will inevitably have some overlap; there are fundamental security controls that (should) apply to all IT systems. However, as technology advances, even the fundamental controls need to be refreshed in order to address the ever increasing advancements in security threats.When the need comes for your IT environment to be both compliant and automated, Ansible makes the most sense.
Why? For simple but very powerful reasons; readability, encryption, architecture and transport.
Architecture:
For starters, Ansible requires the smallest architecture. In it’s simplest form, none whatsoever, just its installation on your laptop (presuming linux or OSX). Even in our enterprise offering it is a single server. With Ansible there is no notion of Masters, Slaves, Masters of Masters, etc.
Secondly, you don’t/shouldn’t need to change anything. If you run a linux shop, SSH over port 22 is probably already in place for all servers and if you’ve been doing any sort of Windows automation, you likely already have remote Continue reading
Sorting Bookmarks in Safari for Mac OS X
If you’re anything like me, then you may just be a bit OCD or ANAL when it comes to some things. One of those things is, I like my bookmarks/favorites in alphabetical order with folders sorted first....[[ Summary content only, you can read everything now, just visit the site for full story ]]
Some common networking operations in Perl
A collection of various network- and socket API-related functions with code snippets.Ansible’s Mark Phillips at DOXLON
Ansible's Mark Phillips recently presented at DOXLON in London.
The Presentation:
The Video:
Follow DOXLON on Twitter and join the Meetup here.
Ansible Makes Work Easier
Michael DeHaan, the founder of Ansible, gave a lightning talk at the Opensource.com event prior to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC. He talks about how Ansible can make work easier, less stressful and more efficient.
Watch the video:
See the full post at OpenSource.com
Ansible on AWS: Free Best Practices Webinar on December 17th!
We'd like to invite you to a free webinar on December 17th featuring Ansible and our friends at DualSpark, an expert Amazon Web Services consulting partner.
Ansible Automation on AWS: Best Practices by Battle-Hardened Experts
- Using Ansible to manage infrastructure in multi-tier deployments
- Using CloudFormation and Ansible to manage configuration for more complicated scenarios
- How Tower adds visibility to systems at runtime
- Using CloudFormation and Ansible to manage configuration for more complicated scenarios
- How Tower adds visibility to systems at runtime
Presenters:
Patrick McClory (DualSpark) is a software engineer and architect who fell into 'ops by accident.' Through years of experience in multi-platform and multi-layered systems, he's honed his craft and learned how to build systems at scale that both leverage the best of breed software solutions and frameworks as well as the flexibility of highly configurable infrastructure before it was cool to call it infrastructure-as-code. Today, Patrick helps to run the boutique consulting firm DualSpark Partners which focuses on helping clients make a move to the cloud using cloud-native strategies from infrastructure management through to application design and development. Follow Patrick and DualSpark on Twitter.
Dave Johnson (Ansible) started his career at Red Hat prior to its IPO, ultimately building and leading Continue reading
Ansible Chicago Meetup Recap
If you don't follow Ansible's VP of Community, Greg DeKoenigsberg, on Twitter you may have missed his recap of the Ansible Chicago Meetup.
Dean Strelau and Rick Pollak of Trunk Club invited us to host our inaugural Ansible Chicago meetup at their headquarters in downtown Chicago. This is often how it happens: a company that uses Ansible volunteers to host a meetup, and gets the benefit of being seen as a technology leader in their community; we get to show the local community how a prominent user puts Ansible to best use. Everybody wins! We’ve done similar meetups in New York, San Francisco, London, and many other cities.
Trunk Club, though, was one of the most fascinating yet. For those who aren’t familiar with the business model,check out their site for a detailed description. The short version: they talk to you about what you like, they use business intelligence to help their stylists pick out the best clothes for you, and then they send you a trunk full of clothes they think you’ll like. And then you keep what you like, send back what you don’t, and they charge you appropriately. Great model, Continue reading
Ansible 1.8 Now Released!
We're sitting out a few days from Thanksgiving in the U.S., and it's time once again to give thanks to people in our free software community.
On a related note, a while back James Martin and I were having a conversation about what the collective noun for Ansible-using-people was. We came up with "Ansiblings" - somewhat because it reminds me of Starcraft zerglings, because we are numerous, aggressive, and get things done fast-- but that's not so much why. More so, because Ansible users are kind of a family. This year, our way of giving thanks to our family won't be with a tryptofan-soaked turkey (Wikipedia seems to say that's a myth but what do they know?), but rather with another great release of Ansible.
YES -- Ansible 1.8 is now available on PyPi and our official Ubuntu PPA, and will soon be available via other packaging mirrors. And at this point, Ansible's reached an amazing 919 contributors on GitHub, with over 8400stars and 2600 forks, and you can find a large list of dedicated meetup groups all over too.
One of the most notable features in Ansible 1.8 has been the long Continue reading
Ansible Tower Demo Webinar
We have been running monthly Ansible Tower demo webinars over the past few months. These webinars are a great way to see Ansible Tower in action and be able to ask questions and have them answered by our own Dave Johnson.
Our Latest Tower Demo Webinar
Be sure to check our events page for all of our upcoming AnsibleFests, trainings and webinars.
Case Studies: Ruan & Lifesum
We are excited to announce two new case studies.
Read how Ruan and Lifesum are using Ansible to automate and simplify their workflows.
If you'd like to be featured in an Ansible case study, please contact us here.
AnsibleFest London Tickets Available NOW
Join us for our FIRST AnsibleFest outside the United States!
We are offering Early Bird pricing from now until December 31st.
AnsibleFest is a day-long conference bringing together Ansible users, developers and industry partners to share best-practices, case studies and Ansible news. If you are a developer, sysadmin, operations director or devops practioner, AnsibleFest is for you. Past speakers have included Twitter, Google, Rackspace, EdX, HP, Twilio, Cumulus Networks, Telescope.tv and many more - as well as members of the Ansible Team.
Where is it happening?
AnsibleFest London 2015 will be held in central London at the Lancaster London. Lunch, coffee, snacks and wi-fi will be served... and please stick around for our happy hour at the end of the event.
Want to speak or sponsor?
AnsibleFest London 2015 call for presentations is OPEN. Email your presentation ideas to [email protected].
If you are interested in sponsoring AnsibleFest London 2015, email [email protected].
Buy your Early Bird Tickets TODAY!
Removing OVS Configuration Settings
I’ve written quite a bit about Open vSwitch (OVS), but I realized recently that despite all the articles I’ve written I still haven’t talked about how to remove a configuration setting to OVS. I’m fixing that now with this article.
As part of my ongoing mission to give back to the open source community, I recently started making contributions and improvements to the OVS web site; specifically, I’ve been reformatting the configuration cookbooks to make them more readable (and to clean up the HTML source). Along the way, I’ve been adding small bits of content here and there. Most recently, I just updated the QoS rate-limiting entry, and I wanted to add information on how to remove the QoS settings.
Normally, you can remove an OVS configuration setting using the ovs-vsctl remove command. For example, if you set a VLAN tag on an port with this command:
ovs-vsctl set port vnet0 tag=100
Then you could remove that VLAN tag with this command:
ovs-vsctl remove port vnet0 tag 100
Note the slight syntactical difference in the two commands; the remove command expects four parameters.
It turns out, however, that this command won’t work for all configuration parameters. In some Continue reading
Removing OVS Configuration Settings
I’ve written quite a bit about Open vSwitch (OVS), but I realized recently that despite all the articles I’ve written I still haven’t talked about how to remove a configuration setting to OVS. I’m fixing that now with this article.
As part of my ongoing mission to give back to the open source community, I recently started making contributions and improvements to the OVS web site; specifically, I’ve been reformatting the configuration cookbooks to make them more readable (and to clean up the HTML source). Along the way, I’ve been adding small bits of content here and there. Most recently, I just updated the QoS rate-limiting entry, and I wanted to add information on how to remove the QoS settings.
Normally, you can remove an OVS configuration setting using the ovs-vsctl remove command. For example, if you set a VLAN tag on an port with this command:
ovs-vsctl set port vnet0 tag=100
Then you could remove that VLAN tag with this command:
ovs-vsctl remove port vnet0 tag 100
Note the slight syntactical difference in the two commands; the remove command expects four parameters.
It turns out, however, that this command won’t work for all configuration parameters. In some Continue reading
Cumulus and Ansible
This past September Michael DeHaan took part in a joint Ansible and Cumulus Networks webinar on how Ansible and Cumulus can radically simplify the nature of modern IT management, and how well they can play together.
Learn more here
Watch a quick demo video of how to use Ansible to automate network switches running cumulus linux.
Ansible Tower Webinar
We have an Ansible Tower webinar scheduled for next week.
This webinar will provide an example of how Ansible Tower allows you to centralize your Ansible infrastructure from a modern UI, featuring role-based access control, job scheduling, and graphical inventory management. Tower's REST API and CLI make it easy to embed Tower into existing tools and processes.
Tower now includes real-time output of playbook runs, an all-new dashboard and expanded out-of-the-box cloud support.
Sign-up today
“On the fly” IPsec VPN with iproute2
Only for emergencies.Technology Short Take #46
Welcome to Technology Short Take #46. That’s right, it’s time for yet another collection of links and articles from around the Internet on various data center-related technologies, products, projects, and efforts. As always, there is no rhyme or reason to my collection; this is just a glimpse into what I’ve seen over the past few weeks. I hope you are able to glean something useful.
Networking
- This post by Matt Oswalt—the first in a series, apparently—provides a great introduction to 5 development tools for network engineers. I’ve already increased my usage of Git in an effort to become more fluent with this very popular version control tool, and I was already planning on exploring Jinja2 as well (these are both mentioned in Matt’s article). This is a really useful post and I’m looking forward to future posts in this series.
- Matt also recently posted part 4 (of 5) in his series on SDN protocols; this post covers OpFlex and declarative networking.
- It was good to read this post on Cumulus Linux first impressions by Jeremy Stretch. I’m a fan of Cumulus, but I’m admittedly a Linux guy (see here) so you might say I’m a bit biased. Jeremy is Continue reading
Technology Short Take #46
Welcome to Technology Short Take #46. That’s right, it’s time for yet another collection of links and articles from around the Internet on various data center-related technologies, products, projects, and efforts. As always, there is no rhyme or reason to my collection; this is just a glimpse into what I’ve seen over the past few weeks. I hope you are able to glean something useful.
Networking
- This post by Matt Oswalt—the first in a series, apparently—provides a great introduction to 5 development tools for network engineers. I’ve already increased my usage of Git in an effort to become more fluent with this very popular version control tool, and I was already planning on exploring Jinja2 as well (these are both mentioned in Matt’s article). This is a really useful post and I’m looking forward to future posts in this series.
- Matt also recently posted part 4 (of 5) in his series on SDN protocols; this post covers OpFlex and declarative networking.
- It was good to read this post on Cumulus Linux first impressions by Jeremy Stretch. I’m a fan of Cumulus, but I’m admittedly a Linux guy (see here) so you might say I’m a bit biased. Jeremy is Continue reading
Setting up the Tools for Contributing to OpenStack Documentation
For non-programmers, making a meaningful contribution to an open source project can be difficult; this is as true for OpenStack as for other open source projects. Documentation is a way to contribute, but in the case of OpenStack there is a non-trivial setup required in order to be able to contribute to the OpenStack documentation. In this post, I’m going to share how to set up the tools to contribute to OpenStack documentation in the hopes that it will help others get past the “barrier to entry” that currently exists.
I’ve long wanted to be more involved in supporting the OpenStack community, beyond my unofficial support via advocacy and blogging about OpenStack. I felt that documentation might be a way to achieve that goal. After all, I’ve written books and have been blogging for 9 years, so I should be able to add some value via documentation contributions. However, the toolchain that the OpenStack documentation uses requires a certain level of familiarity with development-focused tools, and the “how to” guides were less than ideal because of assumptions made regarding the knowledge level of new contributors. For these reasons, I felt that sharing how I (a non-programmer) set up the tools Continue reading
Setting up the Tools for Contributing to OpenStack Documentation
For non-programmers, making a meaningful contribution to an open source project can be difficult; this is as true for OpenStack as for other open source projects. Documentation is a way to contribute, but in the case of OpenStack there is a non-trivial setup required in order to be able to contribute to the OpenStack documentation. In this post, I’m going to share how to set up the tools to contribute to OpenStack documentation in the hopes that it will help others get past the “barrier to entry” that currently exists.
I’ve long wanted to be more involved in supporting the OpenStack community, beyond my unofficial support via advocacy and blogging about OpenStack. I felt that documentation might be a way to achieve that goal. After all, I’ve written books and have been blogging for 9 years, so I should be able to add some value via documentation contributions. However, the toolchain that the OpenStack documentation uses requires a certain level of familiarity with development-focused tools, and the “how to” guides were less than ideal because of assumptions made regarding the knowledge level of new contributors. For these reasons, I felt that sharing how I (a non-programmer) set up the tools Continue reading