Introduction

Ansible &

Ansible Tower

Walter Brunelli

Solution Architect Infrastructure

MariaDB Roadshow 24.May 2016 Basel CH

Agenda

• What is Ansible?

• Ansible Core

• Ansible Tower

• Demo

WHY ANSIBLED WAS CREATED ?

• Open Source Project started in 2012 by

Michael De Haan (cobblercreator)

• Because existing ConfigManagement

projects were toocomplicated

• Target : Eliminate complexityto

manage ITenvironments

WHAT IS ANSIBLE ?

A radical simple IT AUTOMATION engine for repeating jobs!

• Configuration-, Orchestration andDeployment-

Management Framework

How ?

• Agentless and with Playbooks

For whom?

• Operators, Administrators, Developers

Products

• Ansible Core + Ansible Tower

Nr 1 OpenSource project forAutomation

Principles of Ansible

SUPPORTED CLIENT PLATFORMS

Linux

• RedHat/SuSe/Debian/Ubuntu/BSD/MacOSX

Various WindowsOS

Unix

• Solaris/AIX/HP-UX

Network Devices ans Load Balancers

• Cisco/Juniper/Dell/F5/Arista/A10/HP/PaloAlto

Databases

• MariaDB/Oracle/Postgres

WHAT IS ANSIBLE ?

A radical simple IT AUTOMATION engine for repeating jobs!

• Configuration-, Orchestration and Deployment-

Management Framework

How ?

• Agentless and with Playbooks

For whom?

• Operators, Administrators, Developers

Products

• Ansible Core + Ansible Tower

WHY IS AUTOMATION SO IMPORTANT?

•

•

•

•

• Stability

Jobs are always executed the exactly same way

• Time saving

By delegating jobs to operations

• Compliance

Stick to defined company and/or ITIL processes

Auditing

ANSIBLE IS IDEMPOTENT

IDEMPOTENCE

Is the property of an operations in

mathematics and computer science that

can be applied multiple times without

changing the result beyond the initial

application.

ANSIBLE IS IDEMPOTENT

IDEMPOTENCE

Is the property of an operations in

mathematics and computer science that

can be applied multiple times without

changing the result beyond the initial

application.

Ansible Core

WHAT IS ANSIBLE CORE ?

• Community version ofAnsible

• No support

• Important Features (Auditing, Job

Scheduling, Role Based AccessControl)

missing

• Not ideal for Production Environment

• Not available in RedHat repos, Only external

open-source, Eg. EPEL Fedora repos

Architecture

THE INVENTORY FILE

Execution Examples

Playbook

Ansible Tower

KEY ADVANTAGE OF ANSIBLE TOWER

•

•

•

• Web-based UI

• Cloud Integration (Managing Amazon, Rackspace, MS Azure)

• Compliance: Reporting +Auditing

Every job run is logged and can be traced.

• Role Based AccessControl

Separation ofaccess rights.

Delegation of tasks, Eg. Recurring jobs to Operating

• RESTAPI

• All Functionalities are accessible over the API

• Monitoring

• Send out Alarm (Email etc.) if a job fails or if a config is found to be wrong

MORE FEATURES OF ANSIBLE TOWER

• Job Scheduling

• Integrates with LDAP, AD and IDM

• Multi-Organization

Availability

• Available in rhel-7-server-extras-rpms Repository

• Current version is2.4.4

ANSIBLE TOWER User Interface

Ansible Tower Use-Cases

Almost very repeatable and programmable Process :

• AutomatedApplication and Service Deployment

• AutomatedAdd/Removal of customers/users in your IT

environment,

• Automated patching of servers

• Rolling updates of your IT environemnt

• Run jobs on a weekly/monthly/yearly basis

Ansible Tower Use-CaseExample

TOWER Editions

Good Links to start with Ansible

•Documentation

docs.ansible.com

•Get started

docs.ansible.com/intro_getting_started.html

•Playbooks :

galaxy.ansible.com

github.com/ ansible

DEMO

AnsibleTower

Thank you !

Walter Brunelli

Solution Architect Infrastructure

March 2016