Technology Short Take 169
Welcome to Technology Short Take #169! Prior to the recent Spousetivities post, it had been a few months since I posted on the site; life has been busy, and it hasn’t left much time for blogging. Hopefully things will settle down soon, but until then I’ll continue to do the best I can to share useful information with folks. Hopefully something I’ve included in this Technology Short Take proves to be useful to someone. OK, let’s get on to the content!
Networking
- Navendu Pottekkat offers readers a comprehensive guide to API gateways, Kubernetes gateways, and service meshes. It’s a good breakdown of the technologies, how they’re related, how they’re different, and the intended/ideal use cases for each.
Security
- Backdoors in SSH public keys? Oh my. Be wary, friends.
- Alessandro Brucato updates on SCARLETEEL 2.0 enhancements and changes.
- Daniel Gzrelak walks readers through what appears to be a very large (potential) hole when configuring GitHub OIDC integration with AWS.
- Here we go again. As a side note, I am curious to know what other CPU architectures, if any, are affected. Will something like this spark a (larger) migration to ARM-based architectures?
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
- Has your team started saying, Continue reading
Bulk API in Automation Controller
Automation Controller API:
Automation controller has a rich ReSTful API. REST stands for Representational State Transfer and is sometimes spelled as “ReST”. It relies on a stateless, client-server, and cacheable communications protocol, usually the HTTP protocol. REST APIs provide access to resources (data entities) via URI paths. You can visit the automation controller REST API in a web browser at: http://<server name>/api/
API Usage:
Many automation controller customers use the API to build their own event driven automation type solutions that draw data from their environment and then trigger jobs in the automation controller. This type of architecture can lead to incredibly high frequency and volume of requests to the controller API pushing controller’s API to the breaking point.
The API is the simplest and most straightforward way to interact with automation controller for any external system. These external systems and tools integrate with the automation controller API to mainly launch the jobs and get results about the jobs. Additionally, the inventory information is stored in an external system and pushed to the automation controller via API too. Given the fact that we have seen enterprises manage thousands of hosts via automation controller, the number of API calls Continue reading
Spousetivities Returns to VMware Explore 2023
After a lengthy hiatus—prompted by a pandemic and the suspension of in-person events as a result—Spousetivities returns to VMware Explore! VMware Explore, the event formerly known as VMworld, is happening in Las Vegas, NV, and Spousetivities will be there offering organized activities for spouses, partners, significant others, family, or friends traveling with conference attendees. Registration is already open!
Thanks to the support of Veeam and Synterex, Crystal has organized a great set of activities happening during VMware Explore:
- Downtown food tour (with or without cocktails): How about a private food tour in Vegas’ newly revitalized area of Fremont East? This area is now home to the city’s most exciting dining scene with local chefs crafting imaginative farm-to-table, seasonal, artisan fare.
- Scenic Route 66 tour: “Get your kicks, On Route 66”! Visit a unique desert winery and two distilleries on historic Route 66. Total tour time is approximately five hours.
- Emerald Cave kayak tour: What could be better than a day of kayaking on the Colorado River? This amazing 5 mile kayaking tour in the spectacular Black Canyon is sure to be an amazing adventure. You should have a chance to see plenty of desert wildlife, and you’ll visit Emerald Continue reading
What’s New and Next in Private Automation Hub
Private automation hub is the content system for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, hosting and serving up content to the platform in a scalable way with an enhanced security posture. The hosted content ranges from collections to container images, whether it's your own content, certified content from Red Hat or partner content from the extensive partner ecosystem, along with open source content from Ansible Galaxy.
Private automation hub is on its way to being the content management system for the Ansible Automation Platform and, with the most recent release, it has made some great steps to cementing itself as the de facto content system choice for Ansible Automation Platform.
Enhancing Software Supply Chain Security
Content can be pretty harmful if you cannot trust the source. Much like surfing the internet, we have become accustomed to knowing that if there is a “padlock” in the browser bar then we can consider the site safe. We also know that if we take content from the community, we do so at our own risk, but when you pay for a subscription that offers Red Hat Ansible Certified Content, you expect it to be safe. To drive this manner of safety and instill Continue reading
Ansible data manipulation with a Filter
Background:
This year at Summit, an attendee posed a question about how to work with setting facts and changing data in Ansible. Many times we’ve come across people using task after task to manipulate data, to turn items into lists, filter our options, trying to do heavy data manipulation and to turn data from one source into another. Trying to make these programmatic changes using a mixture of YAML and Jinja inside of roles and playbooks is a headache of its own. While many of these options will work, they aren’t very efficient or easy to implement. Ansible Playbooks were never meant for programming.
One solution that is usually overlooked is to do the manipulation in Python inside of a module or a filter. This article will detail how to create a filter to manipulate data. In addition, a repository for all code referenced in this article has been created.
This example was first developed as a module. However after review, it was determined that these data transformations are best done as filters. Filters can take multiple data inputs, do the programmatic operations, and then can be used in line where they are used as input or set as Continue reading
Ansible data manipulation with a Filter
This year at Summit, an attendee posed a question about how to work with setting facts and changing data in Ansible. Many times we’ve come across people using task after task to manipulate data, to turn items into lists, filter our options, trying to do heavy data manipulation and to turn data from one source into another. Trying to make these programmatic changes using a mixture of YAML and Jinja inside of roles and playbooks is a headache of its own. While many of these options will work, they aren’t very efficient or easy to implement. Ansible Playbooks were never meant for programming.
One solution that is usually overlooked is to do the manipulation in Python inside of a module or a filter. This article will detail how to create a filter to manipulate data. In addition, a repository for all code referenced in this article has been created.
This example was first developed as a module. However after review, it was determined that these data transformations are best done as filters. Filters can take multiple data inputs, do the programmatic operations, and then can be used in line where they are used as input or set as a fact. Continue reading
Unleashing the Potential of Multi-Cloud Automation with Ansible and Terraform
In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses are dependent on streamlined processes and efficient systems more than ever. One such revolutionary pathway towards a more efficient and flexible IT infrastructure is multi-cloud automation. In this blog, we will look at how to employ Ansible, a powerful automation tool, to tap into the immense potential of multi-cloud environments. We take you on a journey behind the scenes of our interactive labs, where our customers and prospects acquire hands-on experience with Ansible while exploring its newest features. In our labs, public clouds such as Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure are showcased. Using Ansible we can orchestrate a symphony of seamless provisioning and optimal multi-cloud management. So, buckle up for a deep dive into the realm of multi-cloud automation, where complexity is simplified, and potential is unleashed.
The Ansible Technical Marketing team uses a variety of tools to create training labs and technical sales workshops for our field teams and customers. One of our training platforms includes Instruqt, an as-a-service learning platform, to help us create sandbox environments that can be run in your browser window. For technical tools behind the scenes, we use a combination of Ansible and Packer to build Continue reading
Unlocking efficiency: Harnessing the capabilities of ansible-builder 3.0
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We recently announced the general availability of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4, This blog outlines the features of execution environment builder (ansible-builder) 3.0 that was included with this latest release.
With the introduction of Ansible Automation Platform 2, we introduced the concept of automation execution environments. A key part of enabling our customers to create, manage, and scale their automation, they are portable Ansible runtime environments which enable us to truly decouple the control and execution planes in Ansible Automation Platform. Automation execution environments replace the traditional virtual environments in Ansible Tower by providing a powerful dependency management solution. Customers can also improve their automation run efficiency, as they are lightweight Ansible runtime environments.
In general, an automation execution environment includes:
- Base UBI 8/9 image.
- A version of Python
- A version of ansible-core
- Python modules/dependencies
- Ansible Content Collections (optional)
The execution environment builder tool was built to aid in the creation of execution environments for Ansible customers and users. It provides a definition schema that is based on the above execution environment requirements.
Ansible-builder 3.0 enhancements
ansible-builder version 3.0 introduces some major changes in the definition schema to help customers Continue reading
What’s New: Cloud Automation with amazon.cloud 0.4.0
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Control Collection (amazon.cloud) has been updated with a powerful new suite of modules. We introduced the experimental cloud collection for Ansible back in May of 2022 and it has come a really long way. With the launch of the AWS Cloud Control API, developers have a consistent method to manage supported services that are defined as part of their cloud infrastructure throughout their lifecycle, so there are fewer APIs to learn as developers add new services to their infrastructure. The 0.4.0 version of the amazon.cloud collection not only improves the user experience in automating AWS cloud features with Ansible, but also provides improved code quality and an enhanced CI process.
This blog explains what is new in amazon.cloud 0.4.0 that will help both the developers and the users.
Forward-Looking Changes
Migration of CI from Zuul to GitHub Actions
Continuous Integration testing and the release process have been moved from Zuul to GitHub Actions for this collection. The tests include code linters (which check style formatting), unit tests, integration tests, sanity tests, and other custom checks. Using GitHub Actions has helped us save a Continue reading
Subscription and Host Metric Changes in Ansible Automation Platform 2.4
What and Why?
Our customers use Ansible Automation Platform across a multitude of platforms, in a plethora of ways. Providing an accurate accounting and reporting capability is sometimes difficult across the various types of use cases we encounter.
If you have traditionally used the platform with infrequently changing or more static types of managed hosts, you’re probably pretty much covered. If however, you administer a more diverse and dynamic set of hosts, there may be occasions where you require more flexibility, when accounting for managed hosts against your purchased subscription.
That’s why in Ansible Automation Platform 2.4, we’ve introduced a new Host Metrics dashboard tab with the ability to:
- View high level automation run details per managed host
- The first and last time automated (this metric already existed)
- The number of times automation has been run or attempted to be run against a host (new in 2.4)
- The number of times a managed host has been deleted (new in 2.4)
The ability to view the number of times automation has been run on hosts is a simple but really useful metric:
- Instantly see your most commonly automated hosts
- See which hosts exist in Continue reading
OpenShift and Ansible: Bridging the Automation Gap for 5G and Beyond Networks – Part 1
This blog post is co-authored with Ian Miller.
5G and beyond mobile networks are requesting automation capabilities to rapidly scale up their service rollout. To that end, Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructures unlock a great deal of flexibility through declarative configuration.
However, there is a large number of important non-declarative components (e.g. legacy OSS/BSS systems, bare metal servers, network infrastructure, etc.) that will still require imperative configuration for the foreseeable future.
In this series of two articles, we bring together powerful tools and concepts for effectively managing declarative configurations using Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for integrating any non-declarative system into closed-loop automation workflows.
Declarative vs Imperative, a Zero-Sum Game for 5G?
Short answer: definitely not.
Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift are built around a declarative model in which configuration Custom Resources (CRs) capture the desired end state and the cluster works to reconcile to it. This model fits in seamlessly with tools like GitOps and the different engines (i.e. clusters, applications, observability, and governance) provided by Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.
Both tools are thoroughly leveraged by the Red Hat Zero Continue reading
How to deploy Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Google Cloud
This blog is co-authored by Zack Kayyali and Hicham (he-sham) Mourad
Deploying Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
The steps below detail how to install Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Google Cloud from the marketplace. Before starting the deployment process, please ensure the Google Cloud account you are using to deploy has the following permissions. These IAM roles are required to deploy the Google Cloud foundation stack offering. The foundation stack offering here refers to the base Ansible Automation Platform 2 deployment.
This blog details how to deploy Ansible Automation Platform on Google Cloud, and then access the application. This deployment process will be configured to set up Ansible Automation Platform on its own Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that it creates and manages. We also support deploying into an existing VPC.
To begin, first log into your Google Cloud account. If you have a private offer, ensure that these are accepted for both the foundation and extension node offerings.
Note:
- The foundation offer refers to the “Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 - Up to 100 Managed Nodes” marketplace item.
- The extension node offer refers to the “Extension Node - Ansible Automation Platform 2 - 100 Managed Continue reading
How to use the new Constructed Inventory Feature in Ansible Automation Platform 2.4
The New Constructed Inventory Feature
In this blog we introduced the idea for a new smarter way of handling inventory based on the Ansible constructed plugin. Now in Ansible Automation Platform 2.4, we have introduced this as a fully supported feature and this blog aims to introduce you to it!
Constructed inventory is the successor to the existing Smart Inventory feature, and is now presented as another choice when creating an Inventory in Ansible Automation Platform controller. This will take a list of ‘normal’ inventories as input, perform user-defined operations, filter, and produce a resultant inventory with content from the input inventories.
What is Constructed Inventory?
The function is similar to the existing smart inventory - in that it allows users to run jobs against hosts in multiple inventories.
Constructed inventory however introduces new capabilities, including the built in ability to define and use both hostvars and groupvars:
- Groups are present in constructed inventory and play a key role in its configuration.
- User-defined logic (to add groups, vars, and down-select hosts) is run via ansible-inventory, which controller does for you, and is shown in the UI through an inventory update.
- The format of user-defined logic Continue reading
What’s new in Ansible Automation Platform 2.4
We are excited to announce the general availability of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4, which continues to build on our core promise to help customers “Create, Manage, and Scale” their automation.
This blog post outlines a number of new features and capabilities found in the 2.4 release, including the long-anticipated general availability of Event-Driven Ansible. Ansible Automation Platform 2.4 is going to greatly expand the scope of both what and how organizations are able to automate with Ansible—so let’s dive right in.
Event-Driven Ansible
Back at AnsibleFest 2022, we introduced the Event-Driven Ansible developer preview and the results have been very exciting. By developing this set of capabilities in the upstream community, we worked alongside the Ansible community, partners and customers to release numerous certified and community source plugins right at launch. Now fully supported as a component of Ansible Automation Platform 2.4, Event-Driven Ansible comes with a new webUI, Event-Driven Ansible controller, to help you integrate your Event-Driven Ansible with Ansible Automation Platform and take advantage of a host of new capabilities.
Event-Driven Ansible controller for Event-Driven Ansible - Getting Started
Event-Driven Ansible connects intelligent sources of events with corresponding actions via rules. Continue reading
How to deploy Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on AWS to AWS GovCloud in the United States
This blog is co-authored by Zack Kayyali and Hicham (he-sham) Mourad
Deploying Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Foundation
The steps below detail how to install Ansible Automation Platform on AWS United States GovCloud from the AWS Marketplace. The steps to deploy into AWS GovCloud and AWS Commercial cloud are nearly identical. Before starting your deployment process, please ensure the AWS account you are using to deploy has the following IAM roles. These IAM roles are required to deploy the AWS foundation stack offering. The foundation stack offering here refers to the base Ansible Automation Platform 2 deployment.
This blog details how to deploy Ansible Automation Platform on AWS and access the application. This deployment process will be configured to set up Ansible Automation Platform in its own Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that it creates and manages. We also support deploying into an existing VPC.
To begin, first log into your Commercial AWS account. If you have a private offer, ensure that these are accepted for both the foundation and extension node offerings.
Note:
- The foundation offer refers to the “Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 - Up to 100 Managed Nodes” marketplace item.
- The extension node offer refers to Continue reading
Welcome to the Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant Technical Preview
Welcome to the Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant Technical Preview
By Craig Brandt
At Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023, we announced Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant, a new generative AI service for Ansible automation. Today, we are thrilled to announce the Ansible Lightspeed technical preview launch.
In this blog, we’ll walk through the steps to access the Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant technical preview service and get it up and running in your Visual Studio Code environment. Then we’ll share more about what you can expect from the experience and how to generate your first Ansible tasks with generative AI.
This is exciting stuff, so let’s dive right in.
Technical Preview: Empowering Ansible Users with AI
Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant is a purpose-built generative AI tool that aims to streamline the creation of Ansible content. This capability is natively integrated into your VS Code editor via the Ansible VS Code extension. The AI capabilities are powered by Watson Code Assistant, a foundation model trained on Ansible Galaxy, GitHub, and other open sources of data.
The technical preview is open and available, free of charge, to all Ansible users. As more users engage with Continue reading
Welcome to the Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant Technical Preview
Welcome to the Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant Technical Preview
At Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023, we announced Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant, a new generative AI service for Ansible automation. Today, we are thrilled to announce the Ansible Lightspeed technical preview launch.
In this blog, we'll walk through the steps to access the Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant technical preview service and get it up and running in your Visual Studio Code environment. Then we'll share more about what you can expect from the experience and how to generate your first Ansible tasks with generative AI.
This is exciting stuff, so let's dive right in.
Technical Preview: Empowering Ansible Users with AI
Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant is a purpose-built generative AI tool that aims to streamline the creation of Ansible content. This capability is natively integrated into your VS Code editor via the Ansible VS Code extension. The AI capabilities are powered by Watson Code Assistant, a foundation model trained on Ansible Galaxy, GitHub, and other open sources of data.
The technical preview is open and available, free of charge, to all Ansible users. As more users engage with Ansible Lightspeed, the Continue reading
What’s New: Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 6.0.0
When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the certified amazon.aws Collection for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform brings a number of enhancements to improve the overall user experience and speed up the process from development to production.
This blog post goes through changes and highlights what’s new in the 6.0.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection. We have included numerous bug fixes, features, and code quality improvements that further enhance the amazon.aws Collection. Let's go through some of them!
Forward-looking Changes
New boto3/botocore Versioning
The amazon.aws Collection has dropped support for botocore<1.25.0 and boto3<1.22.0. Most modules will continue to work with older versions of the AWS Software Development Kit (SDK), however, compatibility with older versions of the AWS SDK is not guaranteed and will not be tested. When using older versions of the AWS SDK, a warning will be displayed by Ansible. Check out the module documentation for the minimum required version for each module.
New Python Support Policy
On July 30, 2022, AWS announced that the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) v1 and AWS SDK for Python (boto3 and Continue reading
What’s New with Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 6.0.0
What's New with Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 6.0.0
When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the certified amazon.aws Collection for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform brings a number of enhancements to improve the overall user experience and speed up the process from development to production.
This blog post goes through changes and highlights what's new in the 6.0.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection. We have included numerous bug fixes, features, and code quality improvements that further enhance the amazon.aws Collection. Let's go through some of them!
Forward-looking Changes
New boto3/botocore Versioning
The amazon.aws Collection has dropped support for
botocore<1.25.0 and boto3<1.22.0. Most modules
will continue to work with older versions of the AWS Software
Development Kit (SDK), however, compatibility with older versions of the
AWS SDK is not guaranteed and will not be tested. When using older
versions of the AWS SDK, a warning will be displayed by Ansible. Check
out the module
documentation
for the minimum required version for each module.
New Python Support Policy
On July 30, 2022, AWS announced that the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS Continue reading
Using Kerberos for Windows in Ansible Automation Platform 2
Kerberos is often the preferred authentication method for managing Windows servers in a domain environment. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has allowed customers to leverage Kerberos authentication for a number of years now. So why revisit this subject?
Ansible Automation Platform 2 was released in July 2021 and was a major re-architecture of the platform. One of the fundamental changes was the introduction of automation execution environments - the use of containers to consistently package, distribute and execute Ansible Playbooks. Without going into the weeds, automation execution environments consist of a RHEL base image, Ansible Core and any dependencies required to execute our Ansible automation - these are typically Ansible Content Collections and Python libraries.
The move to containers means that we sometimes need to consider that localhost is now a container. There is an excellent blog post that goes into the details of how localhost isn’t what it seems when it comes to automation execution environments.
With all of this in mind, let’s go through a guided example of how to configure Kerberos authentication in Ansible Automation Platform 2, how to test the configuration and how to configure automation controller to use Kerberos.