Aditya Patawari
@adityapatawari
Building Orchestration and Configuration with Ansible
Submitted Jan 19, 2014
Section:
Full talk
Technical level:
Beginner
- To grasp the basic concepts of Ansible.
- To be able to run Ad hoc commands, on demand.
- To create a playbook to manage a set of servers with predefined rules.
Outline
Ansible is a an agentless orchestration tool which does more or less what Puppet and Chef do. It relies on OpenSSH for transport and YAML for creating playbooks.
Playbook is essentially a list of rules which are applied to a (set of) server to put them in desired configuration.
In this talk, I will show how to execute ad hoc commands on one or more servers as well as create simple playbooks. I will also talk about the best practices to use Ansible in order to get maximum benefit out of it.
Lastly I will share our own story where Ansible really helped us in deploying Virtualization (Xen) Servers vs Puppet whose compatibility gave us really hard time.
Speaker bio
I am Aditya Patawari, currently working as Cloud and Infrastructure Engineer at BrowserStack.com. I play around with Enterprise Linux, Ansible, Puppet, Nagios, Python, Cloud (AWS and OpenStack) both as a part of my work and out of interest.
I have been a speaker at FUDCon Pune, FUDCon Kuala Lumpur, NELF Boston, GNUnify Pune and have delivered talks on Puppet, Git, infrastructure scalability and various other topics.
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Sreekandh Balakrishnan
@gnuyoga
It was great talking to you. Looking forward to confirming your proposal as soon as we have the slides ready.
Summary of the call
Vivek Juneja
@vivekjuneja
Hi Aditya,
Is this talk more than a general introduction to the "Ansible" tool ?
I think what would make this talk stand out is if you add more layers of content on real world scenarios, war stories etc.
Thanks!
Vivek
Aditya Patawari
@adityapatawari Submitter
This talk will include a general introduction. Ansible is young, much younger than Puppet and Chef. I think an introduction would help but there will be real world scenarios and hands on examples of playbooks included to help understand the tools better.
Ashok Raja R
@ashokrajar
Hi Aditya,
I could already see and numerous realtime example here -> https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples & for the introduction ansible docs is more than suffecient. What is that will excite me to attend this talk & learn most out of it.
Aditya Patawari
@adityapatawari Submitter
If you understand everything that is given in different Ansible repos including this one then this talk has very little to offer to you. This is the precise reason that level of talk is set to "Beginner".
You may be slightly interested in the usage of Ansible on systems like Xen which is not in Ansible repos but I guess if you look hard enough on Internet and/or spend sometime on Xen+Ansible, you would be able to figure that use case out as well.
Sreekandh Balakrishnan
@gnuyoga
Hi Aditya,
This topic is awesome. Can i get hold of your other conference slides or video to get a sense of your presentation ?
-Sree
Aditya Patawari
@adityapatawari Submitter
I did a talk (ironically?) on Puppet at FUDCon, Kuala Lumpur. Here are the slides http://www.slideshare.net/AdityaPatawari/introduction-to-puppet-12908257
I am afraid I don't have a video.
Biju Chacko
@botsie
Hi Aditya,
As it stands, this talk seems very superficial. What will I get from this that I won't get from the documentation or a tutorial? I suggest you emphasise on the best practices, add war stories and become more opinionated. For example, why ansible over Puppet, Chef, Salt or CFEngine?
In short, I want to hear from you rather than a summary of a google search on 'ansible'.
-- b
Aditya Patawari
@adityapatawari Submitter
Right. I'll keep that in mind. I am going to talk about an example scenario I faced with Virtualization to show where Ansible can deliver better and quicker than Puppet and Chef.