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Intro to Ansible

Agentless infrastructure management planning13 H 45 M

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Episodes
Episodes
  • Fundamentals
    • Overview
    • Creating the Environment
    • Setting Up Ansible
    • Simple Commands Using Ansible
    • Installing Packages
    • Installing Packages Part 2
    • Managing Users
    • Managing Services
    • Running Commands
    • Hosts
    • Tasks
    • Variables
    • Variables Part 2
    • Handlers
    • Templating
    • Templating Part 2
    • Loops
    • Control Flow
    • Getting Started with Roles
    • Roles and Tasks
    • Roles and Handlers
    • Roles and Control Flow
    • Roles and Templating
    • Roles and Files
    • Requirements for Static Site Deployment
    • Setting Up NGINX
    • Templating the NGINX Configuration
    • Creating a Static Site Role
    • Planning the NFS Architecture
    • Setting up the NFS Server
    • Setting up the NFS Clients
    • Restructuring to Roles: Server
    • Restructuring to Roles: Clients

Overview

3 M

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  • Episode Description
  • Transcript

Description: Administering and configuring infrastructure is a necessary but sometimes very difficult undertaking. Manual configuration of infrastructure is a full time job that takes away from other valuable activities that is prone to errors and difficulties in reproducing system state. Ansible allows one to create plans for managing infrastructure using an agentless (no outside system required) approach. During this show we will cover what Ansible is, how to set up Ansible, and use Ansible to create reproducible server configurations.

[MUSIC] In this segment, we're gonna take a moment to talk about what you can expect from our upcoming intro to Ansible series. Justin, if you would please sir, could you give us a high level on some of the topics we're gonna cover. >> Well, Ansible, what does that mean? No, we're not talking about the Ender's Game novel by Orson Scott Card. Interestingly enough, there's a connection there. You'll just have to wait see what that is. But have you ever kind of set up a set of infrastructure? Or maybe you're deploying a web app and you're doing this manually, and someone goes, yeah, accidentally I had to reinstall all that stuff. You got what, yeah it's all broken. Well, Ansible is to the rescue, it is considered an agentless configuration management tool. Which means I can use Ansible to reproducibly configure other nodes. Well, the Ansible way. Now, what does it mean by agentless? I don't have to have another server that is managing these nodes. I have all of the control at my fingertips. So what are we gonna learn? We're gonna learn how to connect to our nodes. How to issue kind of ad-hoc commands. Maybe I just want to query against those nodes. I need to do a quick command. But I need to do it on 30 servers. And that's not expeditious to do just from the command line. It would be nice if I would say. Hey, you know what? Install NGINX, or install Apache, or install Git on these 30 servers. I need to get that now. And well, with Ansible, you can do that. Furthermore, we're gonna take a look at how to reproducibly represent configurations using playbooks as well as something called roles that we can use in our playbooks. So if I know I always need to set up a web server, I always need to set up a database server, I always need to set up my dev machines for my company. I'm running software development. The exact same, I can put those in Play Books inside of Ansible and everybody starts out on the same page. And I don't have to do that manually one by one, right. I can save you a lot of time, make things very expeditious. And ultimately, we're gonna see how Ansible comes together and provides the power to do those things. >> Now, Justin, who would be our intended audience for this series? And what would their prerequisite knowledge level be? >> So I would think prerequisite knowledge is, you have some understanding of setting up, manually setting up, the services that we've discussed, right? If I want to set up a web server and I've never done it, you probably need to do it manually before you worry about bringing Ansible into the equation. Sort of setting up your dev machines, you need to have some familiarity with Linux, is typically what we're gonna engage in. There are other availabilities, but that's what I'm talking about for the most part. You need to understand what services are. A little bit of programming, you don't have to go crazy. But knowing a little bit of Python or even another programming language would be helpful for some of the aspects of Ansible. And well, that's probably as much as you will know. We'll talk about the other parts as we come upon them. >> All right. Now, I know a lot of our courses are certification-based and some of them are more tech skills oriented. Which one of these categories would this fall into? >> This is definitely a tech skill in nature. This is an intro. I'm not gonna give you every possible detail that is needed to understand Ansible. You're not going to become the Ansible extraordinaire. But if you're looking to get up and start to level up your skills. You're kind of pained by this repetitive configuration of the exact same thing every time and you wanna expedite that. And maybe that's something you've been tasked with, then, I would definitely check this out. To make your life a little bit easier. >> All right, well Justin, that sounds great. And if that sounds like something you might be interested in, then we look forward to seeing you in the upcoming series. [MUSIC]