Ansible
- Automation for deployment and building systems
- Similar tools: Chef, Puppet
- Building a COP around Ansible
- Big picture - Stanford Web Services:
- simplifies bash scripting and automation
- migrating hundreds of websites
- download files, modify and upload to cloud.
- interact w/ servers and APIs
- Ansible playbooks (YAML)
- Uses SSH to connect to server and run playbook
- define server variables
- "inventory" files
- define operations that you want done on the server
- Ansible logging provides good feedback
- Ansible modules provide a lot of functionality
- Defining variables in Ansible; may be hard to find where defined in hierarchical config.
- Role: like a function call where you can pass variables
- Ansible tower - GUI on top of Ansible with better ACLs and control of logging as well as permissions for users and ability to do conditional playbook runs. Introspection on each task that is run and ability to debug.
- Ansible vs. Puppet. Ansible is not a programming language but is geared toward replaying tasks. Puppet has more programming functionality.
