[TriLUG-announce] April 10 Meeting: Ansible

[Barry Peddycord III]

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
Website: http://trilug.org/2014-04-10/ansible

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.