Automation Using Ansible?-?Demo (Practical Implementation)

Hello everyone,

I am writing this blog to share my learnings from the yesterday's Expert session on Automation Using Ansible — Demo (Practical Implementation). First of all I would like to thank Vimal Daga Sir, Preeti Ma'am and LinuxWorld Informatics PVT. LTD. team for organizing this session. This session was delivered by two industry experts Sreejith Anujan Sir (Principal Instructor, Redhat) and Arun Eapen Sir (Director - APAC).

Introduction of Guest Speakers

Mr. Sreejith Anujan (Principal Instructor, Redhat)

• Primarily responsible for empowering Red Hat customers with tailor-made enablement services.
• Also heading the designing and delivering high-quality content on integrated solutions and trusted partners across APAC, ANZ, and APJ.
• Working in RedHat for around 12+ years.
• He was a Speaker in DevConf.in 2018 where he had discussed Linux Container Internals.

Mr. Arun Eapen (Director, APAC Service Delivery, GLS RedHat Asia Pacific)

• Specialist :- Linux and Security
• First RHC*(RHCA, RHCSS, RHCDS, RHCVA) in India.
• Founding member of the Free Software Foundation India.
• Working in RedHat for around 17+ years.

What is Automation?

Automation is the creation and application of technologies to produce and deliver goods and services with minimal human intervention. The implementation of automation technologies, techniques and processes improve the efficiency, reliability, and/or speed of many tasks that were previously performed.

Automation with Ansible helps us to adopt a language for automation that is easier to write, adapt, and troubleshoot than the original development code.

What is Ansible?

Ansible is one of the best tool for Configuration Management , Provisioning , Deployment , Integration and Security configuration.

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows.

What is Ansible Tower?

Ansible Tower (formerly ‘AWX’) is a web-based solution that makes Ansible even more easy to use for IT teams of all kinds. It’s designed to be the hub for all of your automation tasks. Tower is free for usage for up to 10 nodes, and comes bundled with amazing support from Ansible, Inc.

Ansible Tower is the Enterprise Ansible Solution built on top of Ansible Engine, whereas Ansible is also known as the Ansible Engine is the command-line tool.

Overview of Session

• Creating VPC, Subnet, and the complete architecture with Ansible and provisioning an EC2 instance on top of that using Ansible Playbook.
• Workflows allow you to configure a sequence of disparate job templates (or workflow templates) that may or may not share inventory, playbooks, or permissions. However, workflows have ‘admin’ and ‘execute’ permissions, similar to job templates. A workflow accomplishes the task of tracking the full set of jobs that were part of the release process as a single unit. Job or workflow templates are linked together using a graph-like structure called nodes. These nodes can be jobs, project syncs, or inventory syncs. A template can be part of different workflows or used multiple times in the same workflow. A copy of the graph structure is saved to a workflow job when you launch the workflow.
• Creating Slack notification in Ansible Tower using Slack Tokens and integrating them with Ansible Tower Workflows.
• Creating a python virtual environment and activating the environment. Installing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (oci module) using pip. Provisioning a CentOs7 Instance on top of Custom Architecture on OCI created with the help of Ansible Playbook.

Thanks to Vimal Daga Sir, Preeti Ma'am, LW Team and ARTH Team for inviting Mr. Sreejith Anujan and Mr. Arun Eapen for demonstrating real industry use cases and I am looking forward for more such sessions.

Thanks for reading