Topic: Ansible Presenter: Joseph Tate When: Thursday, 10th April 2014, 7pm (pizza from 6.45pm) (Re-scheduled from Feb) Where: NC State Engineering Building II Room 1021, Centennial Campus Parking: The parking decks and Oval Drive street parking are free after 5pm Map: Google Maps Sponsor: Ansible, Inc. Video: Youtube (recorded using Webcamstudio) Slides: An Introduction to Ansible

Abstract: Ansible is a powerful remote system management tool like Puppet or Chef for configuration management and like Fabric and Capistrano for application deployment. Ansible can also do system provisioning through modules for various cloud providers. As a hybrid, Ansible is a little more step-wise than a pure configuration management system (which makes it better for deploying software and dealing with multiple system tiers) and more declarative than your typical remote automation framework (which makes it easier to manage dissimilar systems, even systems not originally deployed with Ansible). It has very minimal client requirements and no deployed client agent. Joseph will introduce Ansible for single tasks and highlight some of the built in modules and what you can do with them. Then he will jump into best practices for stringing multiple tasks together into Ansible Playbooks (especially how not to repeat yourself). Finally, he'll tie it all together with Amazon EC2 to show how to fire up spot instances using a base image, configure it with a set of software and configuration, do some work with it, and finally tear it all down.

Bio: Joseph was introduced to Linux while in college in 1998, and while he didn't understand Debian then (and arguably still doesn't), did manage to download RedHat 5.0 onto a bunch of floppies and install it successfully; he then tried never again to look at Windows with varying degrees of failure. He cut his first open source teeth on PHP earning commit access to a couple of modules in 2001, and since has contributed to many other projects. He now contributes most regularly to CherryPy and a couple of pet projects. A long time RPM slinger, he worked for the now defunct rPath from 2005-2009 building system configuration and distro building software. Now he runs the completely virtual infrastructure and continuous testing and build system for a small SaaS startup in California from his evil lairWWbasement. Joseph holds a BSE in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Duke University, served as Publicity Chair of TriLUG from 2004-2006, and has reluctantly been awarded three software patents. He thinks KDE is the best desktop to run multiple terminals in, and VIM is the best editor.

Sponsor: Ansible, Inc "Ansible, Inc is based in Durham NC and provides products and services around the Ansible project, in addition to sponsoring Ansible's development. We're also hiring, check out ansible.com/jobs for details!"