[TriLUG] Feb 13th Meeting: Ansible

[Barry Peddycord III]

Topic: Ansible
Presenter: Joseph Tate
When: Thursday, 13th February 2014, 7pm (pizza from 6.45pm)
Where: NC State Engineering Building II Room 1021, Centennial Campus
Parking: The parking decks and Oval Drive street parking are free
after 5pm
Link: http://trilug.org/2014-02-13/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.