Ansible Weekly: Borg Cow says: You will be assimooolated.

Sept 26, 2013 - Issue 1

Welcome, to the inaugural post of Ansible Weekly!

Events

Oct 3, Atlanta > DevOps Days

Oct 17-18, NYC > DevOps Days

Oct 22, San Francisco > AnsibleFest

Articles

Getting Started with Ansible on Digital Ocean
JP Richardson gives a simple tutorial on setting up Ansible. He uses Digital Ocean for the examples, but the tutorial is valuable for anyone setting up Ansible for the first time, particularly since he covers some of the common setup problems a newcomer may experience.

First Five (and a Half) Minutes on a Server with Ansible
Matthew Smith demonstrates setting up basic security options on your server with Ansible.

On Ansible
Ben Scofield's first experience with Ansible. "Within a few minutes, I knew how to do the local provisioning I wanted and saw how to start, simply, with a single playbook file."

Managing Research Computing Clusters with Ansible
Alan Orth shares the details on his more advanced Ansible setup. "I liked [Ansible] because it didn’t require any daemons or centralized databases, etc."

Managing sshd with Ansible
Michael Lucas walks through an example with setting up sshd. He also talks about battling an "Artisan network" which he describes as "each server is set up uniquely, managed uniquely, and has little in common with anything else, really frustrating any hopes of easy or consistent systems administration."

Why we chose Ansible over Puppet
Jeseem S discusses push and pull based CM tools and why they chose Ansible for their company.

Vagrant, Docker and Ansible. WTF?
Overview of these tools along with some real-life examples by Vincent Viallet.

Talk Decks

Python for Configuration Management (with Ansible)
Slides from Aaron Brady's talk which includes some nice examples of custom modules, lookup, etc.

Infrastructure as Data with Ansible for easier Continuous Delivery
Slides from Carlo Bonamico's talk which gives a good introduction to Ansible.

Code

Vagrant's Ansible Provisioner
New guide to using Ansible to provision virtual machines with Vagrant.

Sovereign
Alex Payne's project continues to rise in popularity on Github. "Sovereign is a set of Ansible playbooks that you can use to build and maintain your own personal cloud."

mazer-rackham
"Sample Ansible Playbook for Rack applications that installs Nginx, Passenger, and Ruby 2.0.0 (or 1.9.3). It also demonstrates how to deploy a basic Rack application from a git repository." By Joshua Lund.

From AnsibleWorks

Ansible User Survey: ~20 questions / ~5 min

New release: Ansible 1.3 Official Announcment

Highlights in 1.3:

Accelerated Mode: "brings connection speeds up to ten times faster than regular paramiko-based SSH"

Role Dependencies: "allow you to automatically pull in other roles when using a role"

Role Defaults: "allow you to set default variables for included or dependedent roles"

For the full list of updates, see the CHANGELOG.

New posts:

Deploying Highly Available OpenShift Origin Clusters with Ansible
A more advanced article (with videos) from Benno Joy.

Scaling and Performance of the Ansible Management Toolchain
This whitepaper from AnsibleWorks covers the main features and scenarios for scaling Ansible.

Cowsay

In response to a cow concern from a new user:

"export ANSIBLE_NOCOWS=1 if you don't like the cows"
-Michael DeHaan

     _______________________________________ 
    / "export ANSIBLE_NOCOWS=1 if you don't \
    \ like the cows"                        /
     --------------------------------------- 
            \   ^__^
             \  (oo)\_______
                (__)\       )\/\
                    ||----w |
                    ||     ||

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