In this series of blog posts, I will be talking about Ansible. Ansible is a powerful automation tool that you can learn quickly.
I have recently been working on setting up servers for different applications and having to build quite a lot of identical servers. I have been frustrated with our old infrastructure setup. Some of the problems are different package versions across clusters and having to manually update each box (which is prone to human error). This has caused many problems, for example one server in a load balanced cluster displaying issues the others not. This can cause customers issues and can take a long time to debug such issues. Also, building new servers is teduous, slow and error prone.
At other organisations, I have previously used Puppet for this situation. By using Puppet I can automate the build process on the server and since the instructions are in code, I can repeat them on as many servers as needed. Testing it also a lot easier. Even though all of these benefits of Puppet there were still a few frustrations. The configurations would get quite complex and sometimes things would not work as expected and took a long time to debug what was going wrong. Also being an agent based system, I would need to install puppet on the servers first and I wanted to be able to do as much setup as possible automatically.
Doing some research on solutions to this opportunity, I short listed down to the modern tools that looked like improvements on Puppet. The options were Salt Stack, Chef and Ansible. For my proof of concept and analysis I chose Ansible.
Ansible is an agentless solution which uses SSH to perform all of its operations. This means it works with very little installed on the remote machine and a lot of different types of servers. When Ansible starts, it gathers “facts” about the server which it uses in its playbooks. This means you can target specific OS versions for particular operations.
The way to build an Ansbile playbook is to describe how you would like the end state of the server to be and then Ansible will ensure that the server ends up in that state by installing any missing applications or configuration. It has a large amount of Modules inbuilt that wrap common tasks that you would like to do. This makes my playbooks look quite simple and easy to read.
I have been very impressed with Ansible for quite a few projects and I plan to use it for future projects as its easy to use and get a server up and running, configured the way I need with little effort.
I plan to post some further posts in the future about my experiences and share some of my code from my playbooks.