Topic: Ansible
Thinking in data structures is not very common among system administrators. Even with DevOps and Infrastructure as Code things are changing slowly. It requires a completely different way to look at problems.
...Ansible has made Infrastructure as Code popular with businesses of all sizes. While its simplicity helps getting into it very quickly it does not scale very well. Even within a small team we can quickly run into limitations.
...Ansible is by far the most popular tool for IT Automation. While IT Automation existed even long before Ansible was even released it has become the first choice today.
...Ansible is the most popular Configuration Management tool. There are several ways to install it on Ubuntu 20.04. Each with its advantages and disadvantages.
...Most IDEs have the ability to fold text based on syntax. This is an essential feature if we are working with large playbooks. Vim has several methods that can do folding. However when we use yaml then we better make some adjustments.
...When it comes to Infrastructure as Code Ansible and Terraform are the main players in the market. Starting with Infrastructure as Code most often means that we make a decision for either of both tools. This article covers the one thing that is necessary to make a good decision.
...Ansible has a great documentation and docs.ansible.com is probably the website we visit most often when we write Ansible playbooks or roles. However using a mouse and scroll through text in a browser window is probably not the most efficient way to do that. There is a better way.
...Visualization is always helpful when we need to understand how things are working. There are multiple tools and scripts that can help us to visualize Ansible playbooks. One of them is the ansible-playbook-grapher.
...Traditional UNIX commands are designed for maximum efficiency in a way that they do not produce any disturbing output if not necessary. We assume that shell commands succeed and only if they fail we expect some output on stderr. Ansibles default is a little different from that UNIX philosophy but we do not have to go with the default.
...Have you ever experienced that you set some IAM permissions and your provisioning fails even though you set permissions correctly? If that happens it may have to do with IAMs eventual consistency.
...There is a lot of discussion about this topic. And the question implies that it is either one or the other. I think that is the wrong question. This Blog post will describe why.
...Ansible is great to get started with IT Automation extremely fast. Its simplicity made it the most commonly adapted config management tool. But once our playbooks grow we need some more advanced techniques like tagging to maintain the speed.
...A very common principle in software development is to not repeat yourself. This principle is not limited to software development only. We should apply this to our whole life. Life means to be creative and we can only be creative if we do not repeat the same patterns over and over again. In Ansible it is incredibly easy to avoid repetition by using use the block clause.
...Terraform and Ansible are the most popular IT Automation Tools and probably every DevOps engineer is using either of them. But many of them are asking themselves: “I am using Ansible and it serves me well. Why should I bother to learn Terraform?” Or the other way around: “I am familar with Terraform, I do not need other tools!”. This Article will show why this might not be the best approach to look at things.
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