Automation

As I was planning an Ansible Meetup about the Ansible Automation Platform (AAP, the successor of Ansible Tower) I was contemplating about a demo environment for the attendants. This can be done with ease as it it nothing more than clicky-di-click. You can imagine that’s not the way I went :-). There is a simple rule in life: If you can automate it, automate it. The complete environment is going to be a multipart environment, so that the attendants can experiment and have an environment that slightly resembles real live. [Read More]

When working for a customer I was installing an Ansible Automation Platform cluster and to keep track of all systems I decided to create a nice message of the day, of course with cowsay. Something like this: ___________________________ < Member of the AAP Cluster > | Host name : thunderbolt --------------------------- | Host alias : cn01 \ ^__^ | Function : Ansible AAP Control node \ (oo)\_______ | Location : Amsterdam (__)\ )\/\ | IP address : 192. [Read More]

Early this week a co-worker asked if it was possible to access the Ansible command-line in a playbook. It seems that is not the case, in a normal, clean Ansible environment. But in the meantime I was creating a playbook that served multiple purposes, stopping and starting services. These playbooks are completely the same, except for the start and stop keywords. Of course I could have solved that with a variabele, either hardcoded or as an extra variable on the commandline. [Read More]