Tag Archives: Ansible

Ansible Tower 3.1 brings Workflows Log integration and Clustering

Ansible Tower 3.1 brings the new “Workflows” feature allowing you to hook Playbooks, set conditions in executing them and passing data from one Playbook to another.

Additionally Tower can now scale beyond a single instance allowing job processing through any one of the tower nodes in the cluster.

In Tower 3.1 you can easily direct all logs to a central log service such as ELK, Splunk, loggly or others.

More information here: https://www.ansible.com/blog/introducing-asible-tower-3-1

Why Immutable, Declerative Infrastructure is so cool (Terraform, Docker, Packer, Ansible)

Reading through  Why we use Terraform and not Chef, Puppet, Ansible, SaltStack, or CloudFormation, you should see why immutable code is so powerful.

But I would not drop Ansible altogether…

Here are some rules to look into:

  1. Build it immutable – cause you can the scale easily, recover easily and have a consistent source for testing and deploying what you actually tested
  2. Use Terraform to create immutable infrastructure setup
  3. Use Packer to create images that can be deployed anywhere – AWS, GCE, Vagrant, Openstack
  4. Use Ansible to script changes on top of your images if needed. Ansible is not immutable by itself, but allows a cleaner reusable baseline to replace your scattered scripts
  5. In Ansible use modules before you script, and Roles before you duplicate earlier effort. Playbooks are your scripts replacement.

More info:

https://Using Packer and Ansible to Build Immutable Infrastructure

Lessons from using Ansible exclusively for 2 years