Oct 3, 2013 - Issue 2
Ansible passed 3000 followers on Github this week - a great milestone for the community!
Events
Oct 17-18, NYC > DevOps Days [Sold out, waiting list only]
Oct 22, San Francisco > AnsibleFest
Oct 25, Vancouver > DevOps Days
Nov 3, Washington DC > LISA
Nov 12, Las Vegas > AWS re:Invent
Articles
My First 5 Minutes on a Server
This is different than the similar article from last week. It's from back in March, but the walk-through explains the process really well, so I've included it. By Fred Alger
Ansible: Server Configuration the Easy Way
Walk-through using Vagrant. By Stefan Wienert
Registering Public Keys with Ansible
By Richard Clayton
Podcast
Cloudcast - Interview with Michael DeHaan
This is from July, but is a fun listen and covers some of the history and motivations of Ansible.
Talk Decks
Lightning Talk on Ansible
Very succinct intro and also covers some of the coolest features. By Nick Groenen
How NOT to do DevOps
Not an Ansible talk, but has some great quotes like: "Untested and unreviewed infrastructure code is akin to running the nation's railways on untested and incompatible track, points, and signals." By Stephen Nelson-Smith
New in Ansible's Devel Branch
failed_when
This allows you to control when a task fails as opposed to using the default behavior for when commands or modules return codes are not what you want to use for the failure criteria
- shell: /usr/bin/foo
register: foo
failed_when: foo.stdout.find("failed") != -1
Remote system env vars
The environment variables on the remote system are now available in Ansible facts via the ansible_env fact, which is a dictionary (hash) of each value.
Better error handling for SSH's ControlPersist mode
Now if you get an error such as the ControlPersist path being too long (which is easy enough to get with long EC2 hostnames), it will tell you to debug with -vvvv and you can see what's going on.
Cloud friends!
New support for Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers and Amazon EC2 Elastic IPs.
For more on the features upcoming in the 1.4 "Could This Be Magic" release, see the devel branch's CHANGELOG.
Community Code
Hadoop Ansible Playbook
Pretty advanced example. "Installs a Hadoop cluster (running on Java 7, supported from CDH 4.4), with Ganglia, Fluentd, ElasticSearch and Kibana 3 for monitoring and centralized log indexing." From Mathias Bogaert
From AnsibleWorks
Ansible Messaging Survey (different and shorter than last week's survey)
Cowsay
"Ansible user survey randomly reports that 8% of offices have free range chickens."
-Michael DeHaan
______________________________________ / Ansible user survey randomly reports \ | that 8% of offices have free range | \ chickens. / -------------------------------------- \ ^^ \ (oo)_____ (__)\ )\/\ ||----w | || ||