Day 27: 90DaysofDevOps

From Automated to Automatic - Event-Driven Infrastructure Management with Ansible

Daniel Bodky

Overview

A universal truth and recurring theme in the DevOps world is automation. From providing infrastructure to testing code to deploying to production, many parts of the DevOps lifecycle get automated already. One popular technology for managing infrastructure and configuration in an automated way is Ansible, but are we fully utilizing its capabilities yet?

This presentation will give a broad overview of Ansible and its architecture and use-cases, before exploring a relatively new feature, Event-driven Ansible (EDA). Analzying applications of event-driven Ansible, participants will see that automated management is nice, but automatic management is awesome, not just regarding DevOps principles, but also in terms of reaction times, the human tendency for minor mistakes, and toil for operators.

Participants will get first-hand insights into Ansible, its strengths, weaknesses, and the potential of event-driven automation within the DevOps world.

Note

The below content is a copy of the [lab repository's] README for convenience.

Event-Driven Ansible Lab

This is a lab designed to demonstrate Ansible and how Event-Driven Ansible (EDA) builds on top of its capabilities.

The setup is done with Ansible, too. It will install Ansible, EDA, Prometheus, and Alertmanager on a VM to demonstrate some of the capabilities of EDA.

Prerequisites

To follow along with this lab in its entirety, you will need four VMs:

Note

If you want to skip Ansible basics and go straight to EDA, you'll need just the eda-controller.example.com VM and can skip the others.

VM name	OS
eda-controller.example.com	CentOS/Rocky 8.9
company.example.com	CentOS/Rocky 8.9
internal.example.com	Ubuntu 22.04
webshop.example.com	OpenSUSE 15.5

You'll need to be able to SSH to each of these VMs as root using SSH keys.

Lab Setup

Clone the repository and create a Python virtual environment

git clone https://github.com/mocdaniel/lab-event-driven-ansible.git
cd lab-event-driven-ansible
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Install Ansible and other dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

Create the inventory file

---
# hosts.yml
webservers:
  hosts:
    webshop.example.com:
      ansible_host: <ip-address>
      webserver: nginx
    company.example.com:
      ansible_host: <ip-address>
      webserver: httpd
    internal.example.com:
      ansible_host: <ip-address>
      webserver: apache2
eda_controller:
  hosts:
    eda-controller.example.com:
      ansible_host: <ip-address>

Install Needed Roles and Collections

ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml

Run the Setup Playbook

After you created the inventory file and filled in the IP addresses, you can run the setup playbook:

ansible-playbook playbooks/setup.yml

Caution

Due to a known bug with Python on MacOS, you need to run export NO_PROXY="*" on MacOS before running the playbook

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