Ansible for you!

CC BY-SA 4.0

Sagar Paul

Presenter

SAGAR

Software Engineer at Ansible by Red Hat
Open Source Enthusiast
Learning and Automating Networks

 

Index

Introduction to Ansible

Ecosystem

Demo

Q & A

What is Ansible?

What is Ansible?

It's a simple automation language that can perfectly describe an IT  application infrastructure in Ansible Playbooks.

Ansible is open-source!
Ansible works with playbooks that divide complex automation challenges in form of simple tasks.

inventory

playbook

collections and modules

ansible

target node

Inventory

inventory

inventory

Simple static Inventory with groups and variables

Inventory is a collection of hosts (nodes) with associated data and groupings that Ansible can connect and manage. And it contains
Hosts (nodes)
Groups
Inventory-specific data (variables)
Static or dynamic sources
 

Ad-hoc Commands

inventory

An ad-hoc command is a single Ansible task to perform quickly, but don’t want to save for later.

Facts fetched by Ansible

inventory

Facts are bits of information derived from examining host systems that are stored as variables for later use in a play

full facts are attached here

Ansible COLLECTIONS & MoDules

Ansible COLLECTIONS

inventory

  • A collection has modules and plugins which target specific entities.
  • A standardized way to organize and package Ansible content
  • Portable and flexible delivery
  • Requires the same standard of documentation that the Ansible Project does
  • Scaffolding can be created with the Ansible Galaxy command or other tools like content-builder

playbooks

galaxy.yml

tests

plugins

documentation

modules

roles

Ansible Modules

yum module

inventory

 

Parametrized components with internal logic, representing a single
step to be done.
The modules “do” things in Ansible

How are they made?
Usually created in Python, or Powershell for Windows setups, but can be developed in any language

template module

more about collections & modules

find more about collections here

Ansible Plugins

inventory

Plugins are pieces of code that augment Ansible’s core functionality


Ansible uses a plugin architecture to enable a rich, flexible, and expandable feature set

more about Plugins

  • Action plugins - Action plugins act in conjunction with modules to execute the actions required by playbook tasks.

  • Become plugins - Become plugins work to ensure that Ansible can use certain privilege escalation systems when running the basic commands to work with the target machine as well as the modules required to execute the tasks specified in the play.

  • Callback plugins - Callback plugins enable adding new behaviors to Ansible when responding to events.

  • Filter plugins - Filter plugins manipulate data. With the right filter, you can extract a particular value, transform data types and formats, perform mathematical calculations, split and concatenate strings, insert dates and times, and do much more.

  • Lookup plugins - Lookup plugins are an Ansible-specific extension to the Jinja2 templating language.

find more about plugins here

Plays & Playbooks

Plays are ordered sets of tasks to execute against host selections from your inventory. A playbook is a file containing one or more plays.
 

Ansible Playbook

Playbook

Plays

Plugins

Modules

Modules

Inventory host

Playbook written in YAML

Tasks

playbook.yml

Roles

inventory

Ansible roles package automation tasks and variables in a reusable format.

Write roles once, and share them with others who have similar challenges in front of them

deploy_nginx.yml

Why Ansible? What sets Ansible apart?

SIMPLE

AGENTLESS

POWERFUL

 Human readable automation
No special coding skills needed
Tasks executed in order
Usable by every team
Get productive quickly
 

 App deployment
Configuration management
Workflow orchestration
Network automation
Orchestrate the app lifecycle
 

 Agentless architecture
Uses OpenSSH & WinRM
No agents to exploit or update
Get started immediately
More efficient & more secure
 

Year 2019
April
May

nothing interesting was happening on Earth...

March

The equity market went up around 1k points

First picture of a black hole was captured

Archie was born

What happened in June 2019?

in June 2019!

Ansible Project 2.9

Ansible 2.10 Base

Ansible Content

Ansible Project 2.10

Ansible Content

Renamed as ansible-core in 2.11

Plugins, Modules, etc.

Plugins, Modules, etc.

Ansible 2.10 Base

Renamed as ansible-core in 2.11

Content releases are independent of core releases

Content is individually maintained and released

Separate Ansible from the content Benefits

4,500+
Modules and plugins

325+
Modules and plugins

Ansible

2.9 -> 2.10

Single monolithic: 3-6 months release cycle

inner circle: slower release cycle (ansible-base)

outer circle: faster release cycle (content in collections)

Ansible-core

Ansible-core

  • Pluggable architecture that allows extensions through Content Collections
  • CLI tools such as ansible-playbook, ansible-doc, etc.
  • An architectural framework that allows extensions through Ansible collections.
  • Understands yaml.

ANSIBLE Ecosystem

Capabilities
Applications
Edge
Infrastructure
Security
Cloud
Network

 DevOps

  CI/CD

  GitOps

Configuration management

Network Validation

Infra Awareness  

Orchestration

Operationalization

Governance

Investigation enrichment

Threat hunting 

needed across your IT footprint

Deployment

Provisioning

Management

Extend security

Scalability

Interoperability

ansible-navigator

ansible-navigator

  • Navigator is a text-based user interface (TUI).
  • It is a command-based tool for creating, reviewing, and troubleshooting Ansible content, including inventories, playbooks, and collections.
  • Comes in handy exploring execution environments and running content with them
Playbook
Execution Environment
ansible-navigator
content creator

Ansible VS Code Extension

Ansible VS Code ExtenSion

  • Provides syntax highlighting and validation on Ansible playbooks for all Ansible keywords.
  • Extention is Integrated with lint to promote and enforce best practices.

  • Smart autocomplete and documentation references.
  • Integrated with the Ansible Language Server.

ansible-lint

ansible-lint

  • Promotes proven practices, patterns, and behaviors.
  • Lint helps to avoid common pitfalls that make playbooks harder to maintain.

  • Easy playbook upgrade to newer versions of Ansible.
  • Extensive rules to make the playbook quality consistent across Ansible versions.

Ansible-galaxy

Ansible-galaxy

  • Galaxy is a hub for finding and sharing Ansible content.

  • Roles and collections can be dropped in Galaxy and shared with community

Let's see a few things in action!
Execution Environment

Automation execution environments are container images that act as Ansible runtimes for automation controller jobs.

In general, an EE includes:

  • A version of Python.

  • A version of ansible-core.

  • Python modules/dependencies.

  • Ansible Collections (optional).

Why EEs?

  • Dependencies are defined in development, not deployment

  • Automation runs consistently across multiple platforms

  • Allows for scalability, portability, reliability, and faster dev cycle

Automation execution environments.
Reuse and scale automation content.

Automation Execution Environment

Collections

Ansible-core

Dependencies

Base Image

Ansible Builder

 Ansible Builder is a tool that aids in the creation of Ansible Execution Environments.

exec-env.yml

requirements.yml

requirements.txt

bindep.txt

Ansible Runner

Ansible Runner is a tool that allows users to run Ansible Playbooks in an isolated environment. It provides a simple command-line interface for running playbooks and provides a range of output formats, including JSON, YAML, and CSV.

Ansible Runner can be used to automate complex workflows and integrate with other tools, such as Jenkins or Ansible Tower.

test.yml

See HOW!

 Ansible Runner has additional advantages over a traditional ansible-playbook command, it takes advantage of the Execution Environment image and its dependencies, which ultimately allows the playbook to run.

Ansible receptor

  • Receptor is an overlay network intended to ease the distribution of work across a large and dispersed collection of workers.

  • Receptor nodes establish peer-to-peer connections with each other via existing networks.

  • The receptor mesh provides datagram (UDP-like) and stream (TCP-like) capabilities to applications, as well as robust unit-of-work handling with resiliency against transient network failures.

Node 1

Node 3

Node 2

Cluster

Automation controller

automation mesh

execution node 2

execution node 1

db

See HOW!

Target host 1

Target host 2

EVENT-DRIVEN ANSIBLE

Automation triggers on basis of events.

Event-Driven Ansible contains a decision framework that was built using Drools.

We need a rulebook to tell the system what events to flag and how to respond to them.

A rulebook is comprised of three main components:

  • Sources - define which event source we will use. There are some source plugins available already, including webhooks, Kafka, Azure service, etc.
  • Rules - define conditionals we will try to match from the event source.
  • Actions - trigger what needs to happen. Some of the current actions are: run_playbook, run_module, set_fact, post_event, and debug.

Event Source

Automation

See HOW!

(webhooks, Kafka, Azure service bus, file changes, and alertmanager)

Know about Ansible's Ecosystem

Projects in the Ansible ecosystem let you expand automation to a virtually unlimited set of use cases.

Find more information here.

&

Thank you

Sagar Paul

CC BY-SA 4.0

sagar-p

@sagarHuMae

KB-perByte

Feedback

June, 2019

Ansible Core

Ansible Automation Platform

Ansible Project

Ansible Community Package 3.0.0

Ansible Automation Platform 2.0

Ansible Project 2.9

Ansible Engine 2.9

2.10

2.11

pip install ansible-core

pip install ansible

Timeline 2019 

July 2019

ansible community

ansible-core 

  • Uses new versioning (2.10, then 3.0.0)
  • Follows semantic versioning rules
  • Maintains only one version at a time
  • Includes language, runtime, and selected Collections
  • Developed and maintained in Collection repositories
  • Continues “classic Ansible” versioning (2.11, then 2.12)
  • Does not use semantic versioning
  • Maintains the latest version plus two older versions
  • Includes language, runtime, and builtin plugins
  • Developed and maintained in ansible/ansible repository

ansible-LINT Profiles

Ansible content tools

Enterprise source control management

Ansible ecosystem

VS code extension

ansible-navigator

ansible-lint

ansible-builder

Content Collections
Playbooks
Definition Files
Execution Environments

Community Content

Ansible supported content

ansible-builder

Content Collections

Roles

Definition files

Playbooks

The automation content life cycle

Ansible Ecosystem talk

By Sagar Paul

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Ansible Ecosystem talk

A deck on Ansible introduction and Ansible ecosystem

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