ansible-hackday

References and materials for GCB Informatics Ansible Hackday

GCB Informatics is running a hack day on May 7, 2015. This event will focus on automated provisioning of servers, specifically using Ansible.

Contributing

Please feel free to append to this file before the hackday, especially to include use cases or other references. We do not plan to make playbooks public, but methods/resources and tasks for the the hackday should be tracked in this repo.

Preparation

To have a productive hackday, everyone should familiarize themselves with:

How ansible works
Installing Ansible aka Ansible Core - the command-line application. Ansible's main website makes it hard to discover that there is a FOSS python command-line application called ansible, which is what we're primarily interested in. The docs are great though, and ansible can be installed with your package manager of choice (yum/apt/brew), with python's pip, or from source.
The infrastructure pieces - how ansible runs, and how this compares to other provisioning/config systems:

a "control machine" where ansible itself executes (typically on-demand)
one or more managed nodes that are configured by the control machine.

The functional pieces - how to configure ansible to do your bidding:

Inventories - Lists of hosts (managed nodes) and their groupings (e.g. web servers, database servers)
Playbooks - recipes that the control machine executes on a managed node. Best Practices
Modules - the steps in the recipe, tailored to specific software packages (e.g. the yum module will install packages via yum declaratively.

Examples/resources/further reading

ansible-examples Ansible's own examples for playbooks demonstrating best practices
Playbooks special topics - advanced or clever tricks for playbooks - step debugging, dry-run, lookups, tags, vault
GCB's ansible playbooks on gitorious - Limited use for now - focused on a few web applications, but shows a concrete example of what can be done
Ansible Galaxy - Community repository of playbooks for reuse. Like GitHub for ansible playbooks.
ansible-role-firewall Firewall Role example

Target(s)

Take a new VM from installed OS and having been registered for IP address in Proteus to being fully configured for provisioning to requester and/or purpose.

Starting point (pre-condiition): OS installed, IP address registered, networking enabled via DHCP, ansible user account with sudo privileges created, ssh key installed.
Ansible playbook steps:
- Register with RHN
- yum update
- reboot
- Firewall configured
- Account authentication bound to Kerberos and LDAP
- Repositories set for rpms

Target ideas: