Ansible for Disaster Recovery
Overview
When we get into the nuts and bolts of implementing a disaster recovery (DR) plan, an important step is to evaluate the tech stack that’s hosting the critical applications. The techstack oftentimes determines the order of operations and execution needed to effect the DR. Most organizations have the following tech stack pattern for their data centers:
Each of these layers has their own SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) who will need to work in tandem to address complexities and challenges during a DR event, and create a plan to ensure business continuity.
Challenges in creating a disaster recovery plan
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” - Mike Tyson
Cyber attacks, natural disasters, human error, server failure–any number of potential events can bring on the need for disaster recovery. While the risk of experiencing a disaster event won’t go away, the negative impact of such an event can be drastically minimized with the right planning.
The following is a sample SOP to recover an application during a disaster. Depending on the needs of the organization, DR procedures could be simpler or more complex than the examples shown here. After monitoring systems have detected conditions Continue reading
Event-Driven Ansible is Here
As you may recall, we introduced Event-Driven Ansible in developer preview last fall at AnsibleFest. Since that time, much work has been done across the community, the Red Hat development teams, customers, and last but not least, Red Hat partners. Today, we are pleased to announce that Event-Driven Ansible will be concluding its developer preview and will become generally available as part of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4.
If you are new to Event-Driven Ansible, check out the developer preview blog I wrote last fall to learn the basics, and you may also be interested in this video on Ansible Rulebooks, as well as others in this playlist.
Transform your work with Event-Driven Ansible
For many IT teams, there is too much work to do and not enough time to get it all done. Event-Driven Ansible can help your team work smarter, not harder. How often are you doing routine tasks that get in the way of key priorities? How often are you needing to “drop everything” to respond to a ticket enrichment request or handle a user administration issue? Have you had to wake up at night to remediate an issue? How often are Continue reading
Arriving soon: Red Hat Ansible Certified and validated Content Collections for Event-Driven Ansible
Since we announced Event-Driven Ansible in developer preview at AnsibleFest last October, we have been working with a number of technology partners to provide integrated offerings via Ansible Content Collections for Event-Driven Ansible. We know that partner integrations are an important source of event intelligence that can be used to create full end-to-end event-driven automation across your Day 2 operations.
Many of these integrations are in the area of event-source plugins that make it possible for Event-Driven Ansible’s decisioning capability to receive intelligence about a condition in the IT environment that needs a response.
Today at Red Hat Summit, as we announce Event-Driven Ansible as a capability that will be included in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4, we are pleased to unveil the initial set of partners who are creating Ansible Content Collections for Event-Driven Ansible. Many of these will be Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections, and some partners are already in the certification process. Others are planned to certify in the near future. As each Collection is complete, subscribers can find and download them in Ansible automation hub.
Keep an eye out for further communication around new certified collections, and in the meantime, Continue reading
Event-Driven Ansible is Here
As you may recall, we introduced Event-Driven Ansible in developer preview last fall at AnsibleFest. Since that time, much work has been done across the community, the Red Hat development teams, customers, and last but not least, Red Hat partners. Today, we are pleased to announce that Event-Driven Ansible will be concluding its developer preview and will become generally available as part of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4.
If you are new to Event-Driven Ansible, check out the developer preview blog I wrote last fall to learn the basics, and you may also be interested in this video on Ansible Rulebooks, as well as others in this playlist.
Transform your work with Event-Driven Ansible
For many IT teams, there is too much work to do and not enough time to get it all done. Event-Driven Ansible can help your team work smarter, not harder. How often are you doing routine tasks that get in the way of key priorities? How often are you needing to "drop everything" to respond to a ticket enrichment request or handle a user administration issue? Have you had to wake up at night to remediate an issue? How often are you adjusting Continue reading
Event-Driven Ansible: Driving Innovations at the Edge
Across every industry, automation at the edge is enabling emerging use cases, helping organizations drive the next wave of innovation as they explore and execute digital transformation initiatives. The introduction of Event-Driven Ansible is especially exciting when considering the impacts to edge environments.
Event-Driven Ansible at the edge
The edge can bring new challenges of limited or no IT staffing in remote locations such as branches, stores, warehouses, or plant floors. These remote edge facilities are often more focused on Operational Technology (OT), or small form factor IT devices.
Having a single platform to enable manually and automatically initiated actions across an entire technology landscape – from data center to cloud to edge – is critical to facilitating IT/OT convergence, a necessity in order to maintain competitiveness.
Ansible Automation Platform does not require an agent to be present on a target system receiving an automated action, which is convenient and ideal for technologies that cannot host an agent, such as an edge device or network router. This feature makes Event-Driven Ansible a simpler solution to deploy and more capable of handling automation at the edge.
Where do you start? Think big, Continue reading
YOU are the community
New year, new role, new strategy…2023 is officially the year when I return to my roots. Back in 2014, I officially became part of the Ansible community. Admittingly, back then my focus was solely on figuring out how to best demonstrate to my customers the power of having a OpenStack private cloud. Anyone who has ever stood up or experimented with OpenStack knows that this is a tall order. Imagine having to stand up that platform over and over again on a daily basis. My focus was to find a way—a tool—that could help me do that, so I could focus on helping solve the customers' true challenges. Fast forward to now, and the decision to do it with Ansible still stands as the best choice hands down.
Many of you have stories just like mine. You are seeking out a way to simplify your daily tasks, so you can focus on the business. Just like me, you have decided that Ansible is the tool to do it. Before I started in this new role, I did some reflecting on my experience as part of the community. I have so many encouraging, positive, and fun stories I could share. Our Continue reading
YOU are the community
YOU are the community
New year, new role, new strategy...2023 is officially the year when I return to my roots. Back in 2014, I officially became part of the Ansible community. Admittingly, back then my focus was solely on figuring out how to best demonstrate to my customers the power of having a OpenStack private cloud. Anyone who has ever stood up or experimented with OpenStack knows that this is a tall order. Imagine having to stand up that platform over and over again on a daily basis. My focus was to find a way---a tool---that could help me do that, so I could focus on helping solve the customers' true challenges. Fast forward to now, and the decision to do it with Ansible still stands as the best choice hands down.
Many of you have stories just like mine. You are seeking out a way to simplify your daily tasks, so you can focus on the business. Just like me, you have decided that Ansible is the tool to do it. Before I started in this new role, I did some reflecting on my experience as part of the community. I have so many encouraging, positive, and fun Continue reading
Learn about Edge Automation at Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023
As you may have heard, AnsibleFest will be taking place at Red Hat Summit in Boston May 23-25. This change will allow you to harness everything that Red Hat technology has to offer in a single place and will give you even more tools to address your automation needs. Join Ansible and automation-focused audiences to hear from Red Hat and Ansible leaders, customers, and partners while getting the latest on the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform product roadmap, community projects, and what’s coming in IT automation.
Across every industry, automation at the edge is enabling emerging use cases by helping organizations drive the next wave of innovation as they explore and execute digital transformation initiatives. Organizations are looking to extend a consistent automation experience across cloud, datacenter, and edge with the ability to scale in heterogeneous environments. Red Hat Ansible provides a common platform where organizations can build, run, and manage the entirety of their highly distributed systems, even to remote locations where network connectivity may be intermittent.
Because we understand how important edge automation is to teams looking to automate their entire IT landscape with a single platform, we have lined up some great sessions at AnsibleFest Continue reading
Learn about Edge Automation at Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023
Learn about Edge Automation at Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023
As you may have heard, AnsibleFest will be taking place at Red Hat Summit in Boston May 23-25. This change will allow you to harness everything that Red Hat technology has to offer in a single place and will give you even more tools to address your automation needs. Join Ansible and automation-focused audiences to hear from Red Hat and Ansible leaders, customers, and partners while getting the latest on the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform product roadmap, community projects, and what's coming in IT automation.
Across every industry, automation at the edge is enabling emerging use cases by helping organizations drive the next wave of innovation as they explore and execute digital transformation initiatives. Organizations are looking to extend a consistent automation experience across cloud, datacenter, and edge with the ability to scale in heterogeneous environments. Red Hat Ansible provides a common platform where organizations can build, run, and manage the entirety of their highly distributed systems, even to remote locations where network connectivity may be intermittent.
Because we understand how important edge automation is to teams looking to automate their entire IT landscape with a single platform, Continue reading
Learn about Network Automation at Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023
As you may have heard, AnsibleFest will be taking place at Red Hat Summit in Boston May 23-25. This change will allow you to harness everything that Red Hat technology has to offer in a single place and will give you even more tools to address your automation needs. Join Ansible and automation-focused audiences to hear from Red Hat and Ansible leaders, customers, and partners while getting the latest on the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform product roadmap, community projects, and what’s coming in IT automation.
Networks are integral parts of IT enterprises. Ansible Automation Platform’s simple framework means that p network administrators can finally speak the same language of automation as the rest of the IT organization, extending the capabilities of Ansible to include native support networks all the way to the edge. . Because we understand how important network automation is to teams working in hybrid cloud environments, we have lined up some great sessions at AnsibleFest and Red Hat Summit:
Technology Short Take 168
Welcome to Technology Short Take #168! Although this weekend is (in the US, at least) celebrated as Mother’s Day weekend—don’t forget to call or visit your mom!—I thought you all might want some light weekend reading. I’m here to help, after all. To that end, here’s the latest Technology Short Take, with links to a variety of articles in various disciplines. Enjoy!
Networking
- Ivan Pepelnjak has been on a bit of a DHCP relaying kick. He’s recently published articles on DHCP relaying in VXLAN segments, DHCP relaying in EVPN VRFs, and most recently DHCP relaying with redundant DHCP servers.
- William Collins has a two-part series on site-to-site VPN with AWS. In part 1, Collins shows how VPN connections directly to VPCs don’t scale (both bandwidth-wise and operationally). In part 2, Collins shows how Transit VPC and Transit Gateway address scaling concerns.
- Daryll Swer talks about BGP zombie routes on JunOS.
- One notable challenge with Kubernetes is handling traffic outbound from the cluster and securing (or controlling) that traffic. Aadhil Abdul Majeed with Tigera reviews how using Calico Egress gateway and access controls enables users/operators to secure this outbound traffic.
Security
- Via Russ White, I came across an Continue reading
Learn about Event-Driven Ansible at Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023
As you may have heard, AnsibleFest will be taking place at Red Hat Summit in Boston May 23-25. This change will allow you to harness everything that Red Hat technology has to offer in a single place and give you even more tools to address your automation needs. Join Ansible and automation-focused audiences to hear from Red Hat and Ansible leaders, customers, and partners while getting the latest on future Ansible product updates, community projects, and what’s coming in IT automation.
Event-Driven Ansible is a key component to address the complexities of managing varying assets at scale. We announced this product feature as a developer preview last October at AnsibleFest 2022, and we are excited to talk even more about it. So what can you expect to see about Event-Driven Ansible at AnsibleFest and Red Hat Summit this year?
- Red Hat Summit keynote with a customer story around their use of Event-Driven automation
- AnsibleFest keynote about why the next wave of automation will be event-driven
- Breakout sessions from Ansible experts and customers
- Hands on labs
- Discovery Theater mini sessions in the expo hall
Do you have questions about Event-Driven Ansible? Bring them to AnsibleFest and take advantage Continue reading
Take Ansible validated content to the next level with Event-Driven Ansible
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Cloud computing has become an essential factor in IT transformation and business innovation. The highly dynamic nature of cloud environments, where new resources are constantly being added and removed, poses new challenges. One of the main challenges organizations face is the lack of visibility into the cloud environment. As cloud computing continues to grow in complexity, it can be challenging to keep track of all the different resources and applications that make up the infrastructure. This lack of visibility can make it difficult to maintain security policies and configurations, making the infrastructure vulnerable to attacks.
In this context, another challenge is the need to maintain compliance with industry regulations and standards. Depending on the industry and location, there may be specific regulations that organizations must comply with when storing and processing sensitive data in the cloud. Ensuring compliance can be a time-consuming and costly process.
Without automation and proactive monitoring, cloud environments are difficult and complex to manage. In this context, Ansible offers a plethora of tools, such as Ansible validated content and Event-Driven Ansible, that can help you to successfully mitigate security threats while also streamlining your operations and reducing costs.
In this blog post, we will show you Continue reading
IBM Starts Walking The Hybrid Cloud And AI Talking
If Big Blue is going to talk the hybrid cloud and AI talk, as it seems to do incessantly, then the company has to walk it. …
IBM Starts Walking The Hybrid Cloud And AI Talking was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Streamline Your Ansible Module Development with Content Builder
Photo by Hush Naidoo Jade Photography on Unsplash
Are you tired of manually creating Ansible modules for every new tool, cloud service, or appliance you need to manage? Look no further than the Ansible Content Builder. This powerful Python tool can generate Ansible modules for any appliance or service with a network CLI, NETCONF, or OpenAPI. In this blog post, we'll show you how to use the Content Builder to scaffold your Ansible modules to create good, consistent content for your cloud platform of choice. We'll also explore how the Content Builder can help you onboard new tools and services into the Ansible ecosystem with ease. So if you're looking to supercharge your Ansible workflow and automate any cloud platform, this post is for you!
The Ansible Content Collections for hybrid cloud automation house multiple modules. These modules handle the creation, deletion, modification (and more) of cloud resources. While developing individual modules for different resources of the cloud platform can lead to modularity and ease of use, reinventing the wheel can be error-prone and time-consuming. Standardizing the common steps that are similar but differ based on limited parameters can solve many problems encountered while developing these modules. This is achieved Continue reading
BGP Management with Ansible Validated Content using the network.bgp collection
At AnsibleFest 2022, we announced a new addition to the content ecosystem offered through the platform which is Ansible validated content. Ansible validated content is use cases-focused automation content that is packaged as Collections that contain Ansible plugins, roles and playbooks that you can use as an automation job through Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Now that we understand what Ansible validated content is, we still have to see what it brings to network automation practices. We have already talked about a generic Ansible validated content for network automation which is network.base.
Network Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is more focused on very specific use cases – managing BGP resources and neighborship, platform-agnostic network automation and enhancing the experience of BGP management by providing production ready -content.
Network BGP Use Cases
The network.bgp Collection enables users to manage the BGP resources independent of platforms, as well as performing BGP health checks. It includes the following capabilities:
- Build Brownfield Inventory. The `persist` action enables users to be able to get the BGP global and address family facts and store it as inventory host_vars. The idea is to have this dynamic inventory as a single source of truth for Continue reading
Technology Short Take 167
Welcome to Technology Short Take #167! This Technology Short Take is a tad shorter than the typical one; I’ve been busy recently and my intake volume of content has gone down, thus resulting in fewer links to share with all of you! I opted to go ahead and publish a shorter Technology Short Take instead of making everyone wait around for a longer one. In any case, here’s hoping that I’ve included something useful for you!
Networking
- Jeff McLaughlin discusses what he calls the “war on expertise.”
- Ivan Pepelnjak has some very useful and very applicable information on VRF-aware DHCP relaying.
- Michał Iwańczuk shares some information on EVPN inline mode in NSX-T.
- Harikrishnan T wraps up a 4-part series on stateful active-active gateways in NSX. Links to the previous three posts are embedded in the article.
Servers/Hardware
- Manoj Kumar provides a beginner’s guide to Trusted Platform Module (TPM).
Security
- GitHub recently had to change their RSA SSH host key; be sure to check out the details.
- Google warns users about exploitable flaws in popular Android phones.
- Rory McCune examines some container security fundamentals that arise from the fact that “containers are just processes.”
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
- Laurent Continue reading
What’s New: Cloud Automation with amazon.cloud 0.3.0
Last year, we made available an experimental alpha Ansible Content Collection of generated modules using the AWS Cloud Control API to interact with AWS services. Although the Collection is not intended for production, we are constantly trying to improve and extend its functionality and achieve its supportability in the future.
In this blog post, we will go over what else has changed and highlight what’s new in the 0.3.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection.
Forward-looking Changes
Much of our work in release 0.3.0 focused on releasing several new enhancements, clarifying supportability policies, and extending the automation umbrella by generating new modules. Let’s deep dive into it!
New boto3/botocore Versioning
The amazon.cloud Collection has dropped support for botocore<1.28.0 and boto3<1.25.0. 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.
New Ansible Support Policy
This Collection release drops support for ansible-core<2.11. In particular, Ansible Core 2.10 and Ansible 2.9 are not supported. For more information, visit Ansible release documentation.
Continue reading
Ansible Automation Platform … You’re using it wrong.
5 things you didn’t know your Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform could do
When we think about automation, we tend to focus on efficiency. Automating simple or even complex tasks to streamline our processes - It’s one of the reasons organizations adopt and implement Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
But what if we can take our automation abilities to the next level?
In this blog post, I’m going to highlight 5 things you didn’t know your Ansible Automation Platform could do.
Callback Plugins
Ever need a job to notify you, log events, or capture the performance of a playbook?
Say hello to callback plugins. These plugins provide a way for Ansible to respond to particular events. In order to enable callback plugins, you'll need to tweak your job settings and supply the directory location in the Ansible callback plugins section.
A list of available callback plugins can be found within the Ansible documentation.
JSON Output
Looking for an easy way to view your Ansible output in JSON format? Take advantage Continue reading
Creating a Talos Linux Cluster on Azure with Pulumi
A little over a month ago I published a post on creating a Talos Linux cluster on AWS with Pulumi. Talos Linux is a re-thinking of your typical Linux distribution, custom-built for running Kubernetes. Talos Linux has no SSH access, no shell, and no console; instead, everything is managed via a gRPC API. This post is something of a “companion post” to the earlier AWS post; in this post, I’ll show you how to create a Talos Linux cluster on Azure with Pulumi.
The program I’ll share with you in this post is written in Go, but the process outlined in this post and the accompanying code is equally applicable in other languages supported by Pulumi. (TypeScript is a popular choice for lots of folks.) The code is available in this GitHub repository. It’s based on this documentation from Sidero Labs, and I also found this blog post to be helpful as well.
The Pulumi program follows this overall flow:
- First, the program creates the base infrastructure objects that are required—a resource group, a virtual network, some subnets, and a network security group.
- Next, it creates a load balancer, gets a public IP address for the load Continue reading