Automate-AAP2

Demo Content - Automate your automation!

A fully automated Ansible Automation Platform using infrastructure as code (IAC) practices.

Context

Installing Ansible Automation Platform (day 1) is easy.

Configuring Ansible Automation Platform (day 2) is also easy.

It's so easy it's tempting to get started fast and to create jobs and all kind of objects manually by clicking in the web interface.

But as your automation footprint grows, the few clicks become a large amount of clicks. You might also end up wondering if a job is still really needed or not. Who owns it anyway?

As any platform you need governance, with best practices such as:

a solid RBAC model (which AAP has)
a scalable and flexible platform (which AAP is)
AUTOMATION

That's right, you need to automate your automation platform! Let's embrace infrastructure as code and all its benefits (source control versioning, peer reviewing, etc.).

Demo Content

In this demo, we will use simple Ansible playbooks taking advantage of the Ansible Controller collection to automate your day 2 operations:

create a new organization
create a user and a team (not really needed when integrating with external directories such as Active Directory)
create a project
create an inventory containing one RHEL machine
create SSH credentials to manage your RHEL machine (password is stored in vault under root_password)
create three jobs
create a workflow including those jobs with a decision tree (success/fail) and an approval required to run remediation if previous job failed
launch the workflow twice: simulate a fully working workflow and simulate a workflow that fails and require approval to run remediation
launch an individual job

Now that you are doing infrastructure as code, in case of disaster, you might not even need to restore any backup. You just need to re-run those playbooks to rebuild your infrastructure!

Day 2 operations

We assume Ansible Automation Platform is already installed. You will need its hostname, a user with admin access and its password.

Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/sebw/Automate-AAP2
cd Automate-AAP2

Create your vault containing your secrets

ansible-vault create vault.yml

Vault structure must look like this, adjust with your values

aap2_host: my.aap2.example.com
aap2_username: your_aap_user
aap2_password: your_aap_password

root_password: your_machine_password

user1_password: very_complex

Store your vault password in a file

echo "my_complex_vault_password" > vault-password.txt

Comment vault_password_file in ansible.cfg if you don't want to store your vault password in a file.

Now edit the variable file

vim vars.yml

Fire up your playbooks

for i in $(ls -1 0*.yml); do ansible-playbook $i; done

The order of execution of playbooks is important, this is the reason why they are stored numerically. For example, a job can't be created if the organization doesn't exist.

Browse Ansible Automation Platform and find all objects

organization
project
inventory
credential
jobs
workflow

If you check under "Jobs" you should see workflows and related jobs running.

You would also find an approval pending for a workflow! (see the bell icon in the upper right corner)

Simulate a disaster and recover from it

Want to simulate a disaster in your platform? 🧨

Just run

ansible-playbook 99-destroy.yml

Then re-run

for i in $(ls -1 0*.yml); do ansible-playbook $i; done

We are back in business in under a minute!

Compatibility

Tested against Ansible Automation Platform

2.0.0
2.0.1
2.2.0

Playbooks tested from

Fedora 35 with Ansible 2.9.27
Fedora 36 with Ansible 2.12.10

Want a live demo from your Red Hat account team?

Reach out to me at swains@redhat.com!