Why Configuration Management and Provisioning are Different

In “Why Configuration Management and Provisioning are Different” Carlos Nuñez advocates for the use of specialized infrastructure provisioning tools, like Terraform, Heat, and CloudFormation, instead of relying on the configuration management tools, like Ansible or Puppet.

I agree with his argument for the rollbacks, but not so much for the maintaining state and complexity.  However I’m not yet comfortable to word my disagreement – my head is all over the place with clouds, and I’m still weak on the terminology.

The article is nice regardless, and made me look at the provisioning tools once again.

Immutable Infrastructure with AWS and Ansible

Immutable infrastructure is a very powerful concept that brings stability, efficiency, and fidelity to your applications through automation and the use of successful patterns from programming.  The general idea is that you never make changes to running infrastructure.  Instead, you ensure that all infrastructure is created through automation, and to make a change, you simply create a new version of the infrastructure, and destroy the old one.

“Immutable Infrastructure with AWS and Ansible” is a, so far, three part article series (part 1, part 2, part 3), that shows how to use Ansible to achieve an immutable infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services cloud solution.

It covers everything starting from the basic setup of the workstation to execute Ansible playbooks and all the way to AWS security (users, roles, security groups), deployment of resources, and auto-scaling.

Parsing text printouts within Ansible playbooks

I’m sure this will come handy soon, and I’ll be spending too much time trying to figure it out without this article: Parsing text printouts within Ansible playbooks.

It’s not every day that you see regular expression examples in the Ansible playbooks…

Using Ansible to bootstrap an Amazon EC2 instance

This article – “Using Ansible to Bootstrap My Work Environment Part 4” is pure gold for anyone trying to figure out all the moving parts needed to automate the provisioning and configuration of the Amazon EC2 instance with Ansible.

Sure, some bits are easier than the other, but it takes time to go from one step to another.  In this article, you have everything you need, including the provisioning Ansible playbook and variables, cloud-init bits, and more.

I’ve printed and laminated my copy.  It’s on the wall now.  It will provide me with countless hours of joy during the upcoming Christmas season.

Install Ansible 2.0+ on Amazon AMI

Today, while upgrading some of my Ansible roles I’ve hit the problem.  Some of the newer roles require Ansible 2.0.  My Amazon AMI machine that runs the playbooks was still on version 1.9.  EPEL repository doesn’t seem to have the newer Ansible version yet.  Gladly, Google brough in this StackOverflow thread, which suggested installing Ansible with pip, not with yum.  This helped a lot:

rpm -e ansible
pip install ansible

It actually brought in Ansible v2.2 (see also Ansible v2.1), which is even better.