Red Hat Ansible Automation recognized with 2017 Editor’s Choice Award from Virtualization & Cloud Review

Each year the contributing editors at Virtualization & Cloud Review roundup products they love, from what they rely on every day to the innovative tech products they're excited to see. This year, enterprise IT watcher and analyst Dan Kusnetzky selected us for our framework, which makes it easier for enterprises to monitor, manage and automate their physical, virtual and cloud resources. Our community also gets a shout out from Dan, noting our 3,000 contributors worldwide. They're a testament to our dedicated community, contributing to the project and enabling the monitoring, management and automation of Windows, Linux and more.

Thank you to our community and Red Hat for driving organizations to transform to automated enterprises. Read about all of the winners here.

Happy Automating to All!

We're pretty busy working on features and updates during the year, but we wanted to have a little fun with playbooks again this holiday season. Last year we created the festive playbook and this year we're celebratating with "naughty or nice" cow-back output plugins. If your playbook completes successfully you'll be greeted by this friendly holiday cow...

But if your playbook fails...it just might get a visit from Krampus!

The "nice" plugin can be found here and the "naughty" plugin can be found here. Special thanks to our Senior Engineering Manager James Laska for the "nice" callback plugin!

We wish you many successful playbooks this season and happy automating to all! 

Tweet #HappyAutomating

Installing XMind 8 on Fedora 27

XMind is a well-known cross-platform mind mapping application. Installing the latest version of XMind (version 8) on Linux is, unfortunately, more complicated than it should be. In this post, I’ll show how to get XMind 8 running on Fedora 27.

So why is installing XMind more complicated than it should be? For reasons unknown, the makers of XMind stopped using well-known Linux package mechanisms with this version of the software, providing only a ZIP archive to download and extract. (Previous versions at least provided a Debian package.) While the ZIP archive includes a very simplistic “setup script”, the script does nothing more than install a few packages and install some fonts, and was written expressly for Debian-based systems. If you extract the archive and place the files outside of your home directory (as would be typical for installing an application on most desktop Linux distributions), you’ll run into problems with permissions. Finally, the application itself is extraordinarily brittle with regards to file locations and such; it’s easy to break it by simply moving the wrong file.

Through some research and some trial-and-error, I finally arrived at a configuration for XMind 8 on Fedora 27 that satisfies a couple criteria:

1. Continue reading

Installing the VMware Horizon Client on Fedora 27

In this post, I’ll outline the steps necessary to install the VMware Horizon client for Linux on Fedora 27. Although VMware provides an “install bundle,” the bundle does not, unfortunately, address any of the prerequisites that are necessary in order for the Horizon client to work. Fortunately, some other folks shared their experiences, and building on their knowledge I was able to make it work. I hope that this post will, in turn, help others who may find themselves in the same situation.

Based on information found here and here, I took the following steps before attempting to install the VMware Horizon client for Linux:

1. First, I installed the libpng12 package using sudo dnf install libpng12.

2. I then created a symbolic link for the libudev.so.0 library that the Horizon client requires:

   sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/libudev.so.1 /usr/lib64/libudev.so.0
   

3. I created a symbolic link for the libffi.so.5 library the Horizon client expects to have available:

   sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/libffi.so.6 /usr/lib64/libffi.so.5
   

With these packages and symbolic links in place, I proceeded to install the VMware Horizon client using the install bundle downloaded from the public VMware web site (for version 4. Continue reading

DockerCon 2018 San Francisco CFP is Open

Deadline: January 18th at 11:59 PST

The DockerCon San Francisco 2018 Call for Proposals is open! From beginners to experts, the Docker and Moby community come to DockerCon to learn, share and contribute. If you have Docker story to share, submit your talk today. The deadline for submissions is January 18th, 2018 at 11:59 PST.

Submit a talk

IT Pros How-tos (new)

SysAdmins, what is your container story? How did you operationalize Docker in your organization and what changes did it bring about? Tell us about a day or week in your life, and be sure to share your learnings, insights, recommendations and future plans!

Containers in Production – Customer Stories

Are you a Docker EE customer with production implementation advice and learnings to share? Can you share your technology stack, architecture decisions and trade offs, and your ROI? When attendees leave your session, they should understand how to apply your take-aways to their use case.

Great examples from previous events: Beyond Chicken Nuggets: 1 year and 1,000 Containers Later at ADP by James Ford and Taking Docker from Local to Production at Intuit by JanJaap Lahpor and Harish Jayakumar

Cool Apps

What are you building with the Continue reading

Using Vagrant with Azure

In this post, I’ll describe how to use Vagrant with Azure. You can consider this article an extension of some of my earlier Vagrant articles; namely, the posts on using Vagrant with AWS and using Vagrant with OpenStack. The theme across all these posts is examining how one might use Vagrant to simplify/streamline the consumption of resources from a provider using the familiar Vagrant workflow.

If you aren’t already familiar with Vagrant, I’d highly recommend first taking a look at my introduction to Vagrant, which provides an overview of the tool and how it’s used.

Prerequisites

Naturally, you’ll need to first ensure that you have Vagrant installed. This is really well-documented already, so I won’t go over it here. Next, you’ll need to install the Azure provider for Vagrant, which you can handle using this command:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-azure

You’ll also (generally) want to have the Azure CLI installed. (You’ll need it for a one-time configuration task I’ll mention shortly.) I’ve published a couple posts on installing the Azure CLI; see here or here.

Once you’ve installed the vagrant-azure plugin and the Azure CLI, you’ll next need to install a box that Vagrant can use. Here, the Continue reading

A tour of containerd 1.0

We have done a few talks in the past on different features of containerd, how it was designed, and some of the problems that we have fixed along the way. Containerd is used by Docker, Kubernetes CRI, and a few other projects but this is a post for people who may not know what containerd actually does within these platforms.  I would like to do more posts on the feature set and design of containerd in the future but for now, we will start with the basics.

I think the container ecosystem can be confusing at times. Especially with the terminology that we use. Whats this? A runtime. And this? A runtime…  containerd (pronounced “container-dee”) as the name implies, not contain nerd as some would like to troll me with, is a container daemon.  It was originally built as an integration point for OCI runtimes like runc but over the past six months it has added a lot of functionality to bring it up to par with the needs of modern container platforms like Docker and orchestration systems like Kubernetes.

So what do you actually get using containerd?  You get push and pull functionality as well as image Continue reading

Technology Short Take 91

Welcome to Technology Short Take 91! It’s been a bit longer than usual since the last Tech Short Take (partly due to the US Thanksgiving holiday, partly due to vacation time, and partly due to business travel), so apologies for that. Still, there’s a great collection of links and articles here for you, so dig in and enjoy.

Networking

• Amanpreet Singh has a two-part series on Kubernetes networking (part 1, part 2).
• Anthony Spiteri has a brief look at NSX-T 2.1, which recently launched with support for Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and Pivotal Cloud Foundry, further extending the reach of NSX into new areas.
• Jon Benedict has a brief article on OVN and its integration into Red Hat Virtualization; if you’re unfamiliar with OVN, it might be worth having a look.
• sFlow is a networking technology that I find quite interesting, but I never seem to have the time to really dig into it. For example, I was recently browsing the sFlow blog and came across two really neat articles. The first was on RESTful control of Cumulus Linux ACLs (this one isn’t actually sFlow-related); the second was on combining sFlow telemetry and RESTful APIs Continue reading

Installing the Azure CLI on Fedora 27

This post is a follow-up to a post from earlier this year on manually installing the Azure CLI on Fedora 25. I encourage you to refer back to that post for a bit of background. I’m writing this post because the procedure for manually installing the Azure CLI on Fedora 27 is slightly different than the procedure for Fedora 25.

Here are the steps to install the Azure CLI into a Python virtual environment on Fedora 27. Even though they are almost identical to the Fedora 25 instructions (one additional package is required), I’m including all the information here for the sake of completeness.

1. Make sure that the “gcc”, “libffi-devel”, “python-devel”, “openssl-devel”, “python-pip”, and “redhat-rpm-config” packages are installed (you can use dnf to take care of this). Some of these packages may already be installed; during my testing with a Fedora 27 Cloud Base Vagrant image, these needed to be installed. (The change from Fedora 25 is the addition of the “redhat-rpm-config” package.)

2. Install virtualenv either with pip install virtualenv or dnf install python2-virtualenv. I used dnf, but I don’t think the method you use here will have any material effects.

3. Create a new Python virtual environment with Continue reading

Getting Started: Setting Up A Job Template

Welcome to another post in our Getting Started series. In our previous post, we discussed the basic structure of how you can write your first playbook.

In this post, we will discuss how to set up job templates and run them against your inventory. We will also discuss job output and how you can view previous job runs to compare and contrast successful/failed runs.

Before we get started, a gentle reminder that in order to run job templates successfully in Red Hat^® Ansible^® Tower, you will need to have an inventory present, an updated project to select a playbook from to run against and up-to-date credentials. 

Job Templates: What Are They?

Job templates are a definition and set of parameters for running an Ansible Playbook. In Ansible Tower, job templates are a visual realization of the ansible-playbook command and all flags you can utilize when executing from the command line. A job template defines the combination of a playbook from a project, an inventory, a credential and any other Ansible parameters required to run.

When you run playbooks from the command line you use arguments to control and direct it. Whether you're invoking an inventory file Continue reading

Using Vagrant with Libvirt on Fedora 27

In this post, I’m going to show you how to use Vagrant with Libvirt via the vagrant-libvirt provider when running on Fedora 27. Both Vagrant and Libvirt are topics I’ve covered more than a few times here on this site, but this is the first time I’ve discussed combining the two projects.

If you’re unfamiliar with Vagrant, I recommend you start first with my quick introduction to Vagrant, after which you can browse all the “Vagrant”-tagged articles on my site for a bit more information. If you’re unfamiliar with Libvirt, you can browse all my “Libvirt”-tagged articles; I don’t have an introductory post for Libvirt.

Background

I first experimented with the Libvirt provider for Vagrant quite some time ago, but at that time I was using the Libvirt provider to communicate with a remote Libvirt daemon (the use case was using Vagrant to create and destroy KVM guest domains via Libvirt on a remote Linux host). I found this setup to be problematic and error-prone, and discarded it after only a short while.

Recently, I revisited using the Libvirt provider for Vagrant on my Fedora laptop (which I rebuilt with Fedora 27). As I mentioned in this post Continue reading

Simplifying the Management of Kubernetes with Docker Enterprise Edition

Back in October at DockerCon Europe, we announced that Docker will be delivering a  seamless and simplified integration of Kubernetes into the Docker platform. By integrating Kubernetes with Docker EE, we provide the choice to use Kubernetes and/or Docker Swarm for orchestration while maintaining the consistent developer to operator workflow users have come to expect from Docker. For users, this means they get an unmodified, conformant version of Kubernetes with the added value of the Docker platform including security, management, a familiar developer workflow and tooling, broad ecosystem compatibility and an adherence to industry standards including containerd and the OCI.

One of the biggest questions that we’ve been asked since we announced support for Kubernetes at  DockerCon EU –  what does this mean for an operations team that is already using Kubernetes to orchestrate containers within their enterprise? The answer is really fairly straightforward  –  Kubernetes teams using Docker EE will have the following:

• Full access to the Kube API and all Kubernetes constructs
• Native use of KubeCTL
• If you are developing in Kube YML, seamless deployment
• Ability to develop  in Docker with Compose and leverage your best practices around Kubernetes services

Docker Enterprise Edition with support for Kubernetes Continue reading

Using SAML with Ansible Tower

This blog post focuses on getting Red Hat Ansible Tower to use SAML as quick as possible. We will use the free OneLogin SAML provider service. Users with an existing SAML service may still find this blog post useful; especially the last section with some troublehooting tips.

Getting Ansible Tower to interoperate with OneLogin SAML requires both systems to have values from each other. This blog post is separated into three sections: the interdependent fields of the two systems, a detailed walkthrough of configuring OneLogin and Ansible Tower with both interdependent and per-system fields and values, and the troubleshooting of potential misconfigurations and corresponding error messages in Ansible Tower.

Interdependence of Ansible Tower and OneLogin

Defined in Ansible Tower, needed by OneLogin:

1. ACS URL
2. Entity ID

Defined in OneLogin, needed by Ansible Tower:

1. Issuer URL
2. SAML 2.0 Endpoint (HTTP)
3. X.509 Certificate

Ansible Tower and OneLogin Definitions

Announcing the General Availability of containerd 1.0, the industry-standard runtime used by millions of users

Today, we’re pleased to announce that containerd (pronounced Con-Tay-Ner-D), an industry-standard runtime for building container solutions, has reached its 1.0 milestone. containerd has already been deployed in millions of systems in production today, making it the most widely adopted runtime and an essential upstream component of the Docker platform.

Built to address the needs of modern container platforms like Docker and orchestration systems like Kubernetes, containerd ensures users have a consistent dev to ops experience. From Docker’s initial announcement last year that it was spinning out its core runtime to its donation to the CNCF in March 2017, the containerd project has experienced significant growth and progress over the past 12 months. .

Within both the Docker and Kubernetes communities, there has been a significant uptick in contributions from independents and CNCF member companies alike including Docker, Google, NTT, IBM, Microsoft, AWS, ZTE, Huawei and ZJU. Similarly, the maintainers have been working to add key functionality to containerd.The initial containerd donation provided everything users need to ensure a seamless container experience including methods for:

• transferring container images,
• container execution and supervision,
• low-level local storage and network interfaces and
• the ability to work on both Linux, Windows and other platforms. Continue reading

The Journey to 150,000 Containers at PayPal

PayPal is committed to democratizing financial services and empowering people and businesses to join and thrive in the global economy. Their open digital payments platform gives 218 million active account holders the confidence to connect and transact in new and powerful ways. To achieve this, PayPal has built a global presence that must be highly available to all its users: if PayPal is down, the effects ripple down to many of their small business customers, who rely on PayPal as their sole payment processing solution.

PayPal turned to Docker Enterprise Edition  to help them achieve new operational efficiencies, including a 50% increase in the speed of their build-test-deploy cycles. At the same time, they increased application availability through Docker’s dynamic placement capabilities and infrastructure independence; and they improved security by using Docker to automate and granularly control access to resources. On top of the operational benefits, PayPal’s use of Docker empowered developers to innovate and try new tools and frameworks that previously were difficult to introduce due to PayPal’s application and operational complexity.

Meghdoot Bhattacharya, Cloud Engineer at PayPal, shared the journey his team has helped PayPal undertake over the course of the past two years to introduce Docker in Continue reading

OpenShift Ansible Broker: Available Now

Our Red Hat colleagues over on the OpenShift Container Platform team have announced the general availability of OpenShift Ansible Broker, which is a new way to easily orchestrate things external to an OpenShift-deployed containerized application by using Ansible automation. But just what is the OpenShift Ansible Broker, and how does it fit into the wider Ansible ecosystem?

At the simplest level, the Red Hat OpenShift team has given users a way to expose Ansible workloads in the OpenShift Container Platform Service Catalog via the Open Service Broker API.

If you haven’t already, we’d recommend you read What’s new in OpenShift 3.7 as this has a good explanation of the concepts and motivation behind the work.

This is a fantastic development that places Ansible in a prime position within the OpenShift Container Platform Service Broker and great news for the continued journey for Ansible as Red Hat’s language of automation. It extends the current capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform with Ansible’s simple, powerful, and agentless capability, making the journey to hybrid cloud easier. There are some best practices about how you can use this new capability to achieve maximum benefit, and we’d like to discuss that here.

Continue reading

Introducing Docker Community Leaders – Formerly Known as Meetup Organizers

As we continue to grow, we’ve been thinking of ways to better serve the Docker community and give more visibility and recognition to the people who don’t just organize events, but who also teach, mentor and volunteer in their community.

What’s New?

• New name! These folks don’t just organize meetups, they are leaders, mentors, teachers, speakers, and volunteers in their local community.
• New mascot! About time right?  What better animal than the social dolphin to represent this amazing group! Our community leaders are pros at juggling several tasks and filling multiple roles at the same time.
• New Docker Community Events site! We’ve brought the community to docker.com making it easier than ever for you to find a local event! Learn more here. 

They spoke and we listened

At each DockerCon, we host a Summit for our Meetup Organizers to make connections, review best practices, and give feedback on what we’re doing well and what we can do better. In Austin, the group reviewed their program as a whole, and came to the decision that the title Meetup Organizer didn’t fully encompass the complete role they played in their local community. After the conference, we continued the conversation, and they Continue reading

AWS re:Invent 2017 Keynote with Andy Jassy

This is a liveblog of the re:Invent 2017 keynote with Andy Jassy, taking place on Wednesday at the Venetian. As fully expected given the long queues and massive crowds, even arriving an hour early to the keynote isn’t soon enough; there’s already a huge crowd gathered to make it into the venue. Fortunately, I did make it in and scored a reasonable seat from which to write this liveblog.

The pre-keynote time is filled with catchy dance music arranged by a live DJ (same live DJ as last year, if I’m not mistaken). There’s already been quite a few announcements made this year even before today’s keynote: Amazon Sumerian (AR/VR service), new regions and availability zones (AZs), and new bare metal instances, just to name a few of the big ones. There’s been a great deal of speculation regarding what will be announced in today’s keynote, but there’s no doubt there will be a ton of announcements around service enhancements and new services. Rumors are flying about a managed Kubernetes offering; we shall see.

Promptly at 8am, the keynote starts with a brief video, and Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, takes the stage. Jassy welcomes attendees to the sixth annual Continue reading

Liveblog: Deep Dive on Amazon Elastic File System

This is a liveblog of the AWS re:Invent 2017 session titled “Deep Dive on Amazon Elastic File System (EFS).” The presenters are Edward Naim and Darryl Osborne, both with AWS. This is my last session of day 2 of re:Invent; thus far, most of my time has been spent in hands-on workshops with only a few breakout sessions today. EFS is a topic I’ve watched, but haven’t had time to really dig into, so I’m looking forward to this session.

Naim kicks off the session with looking at the four phases users go through when they are choosing/adopting a storage solution:

1. Choosing the right storage solution
2. Testing and optimizing
3. Ingest (loading data)
4. Running it (operating it in production)

Starting with Phase 1, Naim outlines the three main things that people think about. The first item is storage type. The second is features and performance, and the third item is economics (how much does it cost). Diving into each of these items in a bit more detail, Naim talks about file storage, block storage, and object storage, and the characteristics of each of these approaches. Having covered these approaches, Naim returns to file storage (naturally) and talks about why file Continue reading

How Docker Enterprise Edition Helps Open Doors at Assa Abloy

ASSA ABLOY is the world’s largest lock manufacturer with 47,000 employees worldwide and well-known brands like Yale, Sargent and Assa in their portfolio. The vision for ASSA ABLOY is to become the most innovative provider of door opening solutions through growth of electro-mechanical and digital entry solutions. With increasingly global operations to deal with as well, ASSA ABLOY recognized the opportunity to leverage public cloud, microservices and containers to fuel this digital transformation.

Jan Hedstrom, Cloud Infrastructure Architect in the Shared Technologies department at ASSA ABLOY, and Patrick Van Der Bleek, Solutions Engineer at Docker, presented at DockerCon Europe how ASSA ABLOY leveraged Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE)  as their central secure container management platform for their global hardware and software workflow . 

You can watch their entire talk here:

Journey from Docker CE to Docker EE

Some developers at ASSA ABLOY started using Docker for microservice development back in 2014, but it was uncoordinated with manual, scripted deployments of containers onto individual servers, inconsistent practices, no separation between teams, and without any image standards. Additionally, ASSA ABLOY knew that going to a public cloud like AWS would give them a “datacenter with superpowers”, but they were concerned about cloud Continue reading