April 2, 2015 - Issue 57

Still up for totally dumb jokes? Yes? Great!
Then, I'm introducing the new newsletter mascot: Cowlvin Klein!

April Fools (I know, I know)

New European 'fork' of Ansible called 'Ensible'
by Inuits (look at the source code to get the joke)

Cool Tips

Extending Ansible (plugins, wrapping in Python, etc)
by Tyler Turk

Ansible Filters for Taming Lists (Part 1)
by George Boobyer

Fast Caching Facts Ansible
by Erik-Jan Riemers

Install Stuff

Installing Zabbix-Agent with Ansible
by Werner Dijkerman

Ansible Playbook – GlusterFS – Apache
by Larry Smith Jr.

Networking

Getting Started with Juniper and Ansible
by Kirk Byers

Spinning Stuff Up

Creating Development Environments with Vagrant and Ansible
by Steve Edson

Creating vSphere VM’s using Ansible
by Larry Smith Jr.

Stuff Working Together

Continuous Deployment Using Ansible, Docker, SQS and TeamCity
by Ben Whaley

Presentiation: Ansible + Drupal + Raspberry Pi Dramble
also Lessons Learned building the Raspberry Pi Dramble
by Jeff Geerling (includes slides and video)

Opbeat Release Tracking with Ansible
by Danilo Bargen

Ceph Rolling Upgrades with Ansible
by Sebastien Han

Recent Articles

Auto testing and validating the Ansible STIG Role for Red Hat 6
also DISA STIG Remediation: Automagically
by Jonathan Davila

Top 5 Best and Worst Attributes of Ansible
by ScriptRock

Lessons from Using Ansible Exclusively for 2 Years
by Corban Raun

For Beginners

Getting Started with Ansible in 5 Minutes
by Ronan Berder

Quick and Dirty Guide to Deploying Go Apps
by Chris Saunders

Ansible and Facts How to Use them
by Luca Francesca

Slides

Integrating Docker, Jenkins, and Ansible in Production
by André Christ

Micro Services Infrastructure with AWS and Ansible
by Bamdad Dashtban

Ansible Updates

Another Cool (last-minute) Ansible v2 Feature
by James Cammarata

Ansible 1.9.0 Released
by James Cammarata

1.9.0 Highlights:

• Improved ssh connection error reporting, now you get back the specific message from ssh.
• Added facility to document task module return values for registered vars, both for ansible-doc and the docsite. Documented copy, stats and acl modules, the rest must be updated individually (we will start doing so incrementally).
• Optimize the plugin loader to cache available plugins much more efficiently. For some use cases this can lead to dramatic improvements in startup time.
• Fix skipped tasks to not display their parameters if no_log is specified.
• environment: directive now can also be applied to play and is inhertited by tasks, which can still overridde it.

1.9.0 New Modules:

• cryptab: manages linux encrypted block devices
• gce_img: for utilizing GCE image resources
• gluster_volume: manage glusterfs volumes
• haproxy: for the load balancer of same name
• known_hosts: manages the ssh known_hosts file
• lxc_container: manage lxc containers
• patch: allows for patching files on target systems
• pkg5: installing and uninstalling packages on Solaris
• pkg5_publisher: manages Solaris pkg5 repository configuration
• postgresql_ext: manage postgresql extensions
• snmp_facts: gather facts via snmp
• svc: manages daemontools based services
• uptimerobot: manage monitoring with this service

For more details, see the CHANGELOG.

Cowsay

via Serge (referencing this pull request)

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