Ansible

Kargo (a.k.a Kubespray) is an initiative to deploy a Kubernetes cluster using Ansible. It will contrast with our previous Step by Step article by showing that we can deploy a cluster with a single command, a bit like the newly integrated SwarmKit feature announced in Docker 1.12 docker swarm init. Introduction As you’ve seen in our Step by Step article, deploying a Kubernetes cluster manually is a long, error prone and tedious process. This exercice was just meant as a learning exercice, to understand the different moving parts and how everything fits together. ...

Since my last post about Rackspace Private Cloud (RPC), a Private cloud solution, so much has changed. RPC version number is now aligning with the OpenStack ones, so they’ve switched from v4 directly to v9. It’s also a good idea for Rackspace to bump up the version number to share with the rest of the world this version does have nothing in common with the earlier one, apart from OpenStack code. RPC v9 is now using Ansible instead of Chef and Linux Bridges instead of Open vSwitch until OVS get more stable for their use case. It seems they had issues with it which justify reverting to Linux Bridges instead. They are commiting on 99.99% API availability, so they better have a stable distrib. ...

Over the last few weeks I built a new home lab based on the Supermicro A1SAi-2750F motherboard. Instead of manually configuring the required infrastructure services like DNS, NTP, OpenVPN and DHCP, I’m using Ansible to do all of it, in an easy and repeatable fashion. As a reminder Ansible is a YAML based configuration management tool, it’s agentless, use SSH as a communication medium. It’s simple and efficient. Read our intro article for more details. In this article I’ll details how to install a ISC DHCP server using Ansible. ISC DHCP is production-grade software that offers a complete solution for implementing DHCP servers, relay agents, and clients for small local networks to large enterprises. ...

It’s now time to give Ansible a chance to enter the battleground of OpenStack deployer tool. We’ll use Ansible 1.7 and Blue Box playbooks to achieve that goal. If you don’t have Ansible already installed, consult our previous article or the official documentation. You’ll see it’s quite easy. Ansible by itself doesn’t install the Operating system on Bare Metal. But Ansible author, Michael DeHaan, developped Cobbler a PXE solution back when working for Red Hat. So you can use this tool or any other tools like MAAS, Razor to install at least four Ubuntu 12.04 servers. ...

Ansible seems to be the simplest tool to centrally manage systems of any kind, Docker containers, AWS, Google Compute, Rackspace, OpenStack instances, VMware VMs, etc… There isn’t any dependencies on the managed system apart from Python 2.6. Ansible isn’t using any database or daemon and won’t install anything on the managed system, all operations are executed using SSH. In this article, I’ll details how to install it will introduce the main concepts and terminologies. You’ll then understand why companies like Evernote, Twitter, Nasa, Rackspace or Atlassian are all using this Configuration Management, deployment and orchestration tool Compared to other solutions like Chef, Puppet or SaltStack, Ansible is designed to be minimal in nature with low learning curve. ...