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Ansible is one of the popular IT automation tools used to make complex configuration, software provisioning, application deployment, and management tasks easier. It is used in IT operational tasks such as:
In this guide on PostgreSQL Database Management with Ansible, I will show you how to automate PostgreSQL operations using Ansible.
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, effective orchestration and automation of IT operations are paramount for maintaining efficiency and scalability. DevOps teams constantly seek innovative solutions to streamline their workflows and enhance collaboration. This blog post explores the combination of Rundeck, a powerful job scheduler, and Docker, a lightweight containerization platform, with the added prowess of Ansible for configuration management.
By integrating these tools, teams can achieve a seamless and efficient orchestration pipeline. Let’s delve into how we can harness the power of Rundeck in Docker with Ansible.
Continue reading “Streamline Your DevOps Workflow: Leveraging Rundeck in Docker with Ansible”Cybersecurity and security testing are important to be part of automation and CI/CD because they help ensure that software is secure and free from vulnerabilities. By integrating security testing into the development process, developers can identify and fix security issues early on, reducing the risk of security breaches and data loss.
Continue reading “Fortifying the Foundations: Unveiling the Crucial Role of Cyber Security and Security Testing in Automation and CI/CD Pipelines”Ansible Semaphore is a web-based tool for managing Ansible projects and workflows. It provides a graphical user interface that allows us to view and manage our Ansible tasks, playbooks, and inventories in a centralized location. With Semaphore, we can easily manage and monitor our Ansible workflows, schedule and automate tasks, and collaborate with team members in a seamless way. This tool simplifies the management of Ansible projects, making it more accessible to users who may not be familiar with command-line interfaces or coding.
Semaphore is written in Go language, and it is available for Windows, macOS and Linux (x64, ARM, ARM64). Ansible Semaphore is an open-source project with high-quality code.
We will install and configure Ansible Semaphore in Docker, and take a look at its interface and configuration.
Continue reading “Enhancing Ansible Automation: Exploring the Power of Ansible Semaphore, a Modern Open-Source GUI”Ansible is an open-source automation tool that allows you to automate IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration. Ansible uses a simple YAML syntax called playbooks to define automation tasks.
With tweaking our project directory a bit we can achieve a very flexible and comfortable structure.
Continue reading “Let’s use a more flexible directory structure for an Ansible project”Automation is important in IT operations because it helps reduce costs, increases productivity, ensures high availability of systems, increases reliability, and optimizes the performance. One way to achieve automation in IT operations is through infrastructure as code (IaC).
IaC is the process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files.
Continue reading “Why automation and Infrastructure as Code are important in IT operations?”Ansible callback plugins enable adding new behaviors to Ansible when responding to events. By default, callback plugins control most of the output we see when running the command line programs, but can also be used to add additional output, integrate with other tools and marshal the events to a storage backend.
Continue reading “How to use Ansible callback plugins?”What is your opinion? Do you think an online webinar would be beneficial for your career about Ansible, the basics of infrastructure automation and such topics? Let’s vote and comment!
Molecule is the official testing framework for Ansible roles. It provides a streamlined way to create a virtualized environment to test the syntax and functionality of a role.
Continue reading “How to test Ansible code with Molecule”VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizaton for x86 hardware, targeted at server, desktop and embedded use. The VirtualBox Guest Additions are extra pieces of software that enable better performance and functionality in virtual machines.
We install Guest Additions inside the virtual machine to activate this functionality. In VirtualBox, we can install Guest Additions by selecting Devices > Insert Guest Additions CD Image on the toolbar at the top of our guest OS window. This mounts a virtual disc to the VM. When we do this, our guest OS will respond as if we’ve just inserted a physical disc.
Here’s my example playbook that we can use to install Virtualbox Guest Additions on Debian Bullseye after installing the OS.
Continue reading “Installing VirtualBox Guest Additions on a Debian Bullseye VM with an Ansible playbook”Configuring the network interfaces of Linux machines can be tedious and unpredictable if we do it by hand. Let’s automatize the procedure and minimize the possible mistakes with using Ansible! This example uses Debian, but it can be easily ported to any platform.
Here’s my example playbook that can be used to configure network for static IP address on Debian Bullseye after the OS installation.
Continue reading “Configuring the network interface on a Debian Bullseye VM with an Ansible playbook”Docker Engine is an open source containerization technology for building and containerizing our applications. Docker Engine acts as a client-server application with a server with a long-running daemon process dockerd and APIs which specify interfaces that programs can use to talk to and instruct the Docker daemon. Docker Engine is available on a variety of Linux platforms, macOS and Windows 10 through Docker Desktop, and as a static binary installation. Docker Engine is the industry’s de facto container runtime that runs on various Linux (CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Oracle Linux, RHEL, and Ubuntu) and Windows Server operating systems.
Here’s an example playbook that we can use to install Docker Engine on Debian Bullseye after the base OS installation.
Continue reading “Installing Docker Engine on Debian Bullseye as an Ansible playbook”Hashicorp Vault is a secret storage solution for storing and managing secrets, such as passwords, tokens, certificates, and keys. In this post, we will go through how to use Ansible with Hashicorp Vault to retrieve secrets and use them in our Ansible playbooks.
Continue reading “How to use Ansible with the Hashicorp Vault secret manager?”Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a security system that requires more than one method of authentication from independent categories of credentials to verify the user’s identity for a login or other transaction1. It is a security enhancement that requires the user to provide two or more verification factors to gain access to a resource such as an application, online account, or a VPN2. The factors fall into three categories: something the user knows (such as a password or PIN), something the user has (such as a smart card or a security token), and something the user is (such as a fingerprint or other biometric data).
MFA is a security measure that can help protect against unauthorized access to your data and applications. It is recommended to use MFA for all our accounts that support it, especially for our sensitive accounts such as banking, email, and social media.
Continue reading “What is multi-factor authentication (MFA)?”Ansible Galaxy is a hub for finding and sharing Ansible content, such as roles and collections. Roles are pre-packaged units of work that can be referenced in Ansible playbooks and immediately put to work. Collections are larger units that can contain multiple roles, modules, plugins, and other Ansible components.
Continue reading “Using Ansible Galaxy for managing Ansible roles and collections”
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