aws-securitygroup-grapher is a handy tool that can generate a variety of graphs visualizing Amazon Security Groups. It is implemented as an Ansible role and uses GraphViz to produce the results.
This is particularly useful when you need to get familiar with a complex VPC setup by someone else, or when you want to review the results of an automated setup.
If you missed the opportunity to attend the recent AnsibleFest Austin 2018 event, here are a couple of interesting links for you, via Jeff Geerling’s blog (aka geerlingguy):
There’s plenty of stuff to play with over the next weekend or two.
Jeff Geerling shares a handy tip on how to implement the configure-reboot-configure pattern in an Ansible playbook.
---
- name: Do something that requires a reboot when it results in a change.
...
register: task_result
- name: Reboot immediately if there was a change.
shell: "sleep 5 && reboot"
async: 1
poll: 0
when: task_result is changed
- name: Wait for the reboot to complete if there was a change.
wait_for_connection:
connect_timeout: 20
sleep: 5
delay: 5
timeout: 300
when: task_result is changed
...
“Immutable Deployment @ Quorum” describes yet another approach to automated, and this case – immutable, deployments. This particular setup is slightly more on the SysAdmin/DevOps side rather than on the development side, utilizing tools like Ansible, Amazon EC2, and Amazon AMI.
If you are building very few projects, or projects with little variations, and use a whole instance for the project, than you should definitely check it out. For those people who work with a zoo of technologies and share the server between several projects, this approach probably won’t work so well. Unless it is adjusted to use containers instead of instances, but even then, it’ll probably won’t be optimal.
Listing, Iterating, and Loading JSON in Ansible Playbooks – for those days when you need to offload part of your configuration onto external JSON files, but don’t have a spare day to try, fail and repeat.