Tag: infrastructure as code

Harnessing the Power of Ansible: Exploring the Versatility of ansible-doc

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Ansible, the popular automation tool, empowers organizations to streamline their IT operations and boost productivity. With its extensive module library, Ansible offers a wide range of capabilities to manage and configure systems. One such invaluable resource is ansible-doc, a command that provides comprehensive documentation for Ansible modules. In this blog post, we will delve into the possibilities that ansible-doc offers, exploring how it can enhance your Ansible workflow. Let’s harness the power of ansible-doc together!

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Mastering Ansible: Navigating the Most Common Errors and Mistakes

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As Ansible users, we all want to make the most out of this popular open-source configuration management tool. However, even with its relative ease of use, we can still make common mistakes that can lead to errors and inefficiencies.

In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the most common mistakes that Ansible users make and how we can avoid them.

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Unleashing the Power of Ansible: Advantages that Transform IT Operations

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As DevOps practitioners, we know that managing infrastructure can be a daunting task. That’s why we use configuration management tools to automate the repetitive processes and reduce manual effort. One such tool that has gained popularity in recent years is Ansible. In this post, we will discuss the main advantages of Ansible compared to other configuration management tools.

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Automating PostgreSQL with Ansible: A Hands on Guide

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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:

  • Configuring hosts and services.
  • Bootstrapping the host from scratch.

In this guide on PostgreSQL Database Management with Ansible, I will show you how to automate PostgreSQL operations using Ansible.

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Streamline Your DevOps Workflow: Leveraging Rundeck in Docker with 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 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.

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Enhancing Ansible Automation: Exploring the Power of Ansible Semaphore, a Modern Open-Source GUI

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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.

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Let’s use a more flexible directory structure for an Ansible project

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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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Installing VirtualBox Guest Additions on a Debian Bullseye VM with an Ansible playbook

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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 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.

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Configuring the network interface on a Debian Bullseye VM with an Ansible playbook

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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 static IP address on Debian Bullseye after the OS installation.

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Installing Docker Engine on Debian Bullseye as an Ansible playbook

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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 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.

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Using Ansible Galaxy for managing Ansible roles and collections

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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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