[TriLUG] Rescheduled: 10 April Meeting - Ansible

[Bill Farrow]

The Steering Committee has decided to reschedule February's talk on
Ansible to our April meeting slot.


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 TBA, Centennial Campus
Parking: The parking decks and Oval Drive street parking are free after 5pm
Video: Hangout OnAir (during the meeting)
Website: http://trilug.org/2014-04-10/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 lair^W^Wbasement.
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.