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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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Installing web servers, database services and such tools are tedious task especially when we have to repeat it over and over again, for example in a test environment. Here are some useful playbooks that we can use to simplify the process.
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Hashicorp Vault is a popular tool for managing secrets and encryption in cloud environments. It allows us to store, access, and distribute sensitive data securely across different applications and platforms. In this blog post, I will show us how to install Hashicorp Vault on Debian 11 (Bullseye), the latest stable release of the Debian operating…
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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.
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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.
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As our infrastructure grows, we may have to use secret data of different sensitivity. If our “Infrastructure as Code” is developed by different teams, maybe every team wants to protect their own passwords, API tokens, keys, etc with different Vault passwords. This is why we use IDs in Ansible Vault.
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Sometimes we may want to encrypt only a single variable value or a short piece of text that we need to use in our playbook or role. For example, we may want to encrypt a user password or an API key, and not an entire file. Encrypting single variables is also a good idea when we keep our files in Source Control Management like Git.
Ansible Vault has a function to encrypt only parts of files, to encrypt variables instead of the whole file.
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Templating is a huge work power in Ansible when we want to write reusable code. Just imagine about having to create different playbooks and roles for every host that have a slightly different configuration from each other. That would be nonsense. Luckily we have configuration file templates in Ansible to make our life easier, and…
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