Ansible
Ansible - AWX 2/2
Last week, we installed AWX. It is one of the Open Source upstream developments for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. In the second part of this article, we will explore the UI and add our first workload to AWX.
Automation
Automation is about getting things done, without actually doing them. You can automate everything from server deployments, to updates, publishing blogs or generating a diet plan for your week.
Ansible
Ansible - AWX (1/2)
So, you wrote your first playbooks, played with collections and command line tools, and you consider to have a UI for Ansible?
AlmaLinux
Cloud-Init - Raspberry Pi and AlmaLinux OS
I am in the middle of setting up my home lab, but also working on a project, named beby.cloud. In both cases, I want to do the initial setup automatically on a Raspberry Pi system. Fortunately, AlmaLinux OS supports Cloud-Init, so we can handle this easily.
Ansible
Ansible - Console
With Python, you can just open a shell and quickly try out some code in a so-called REPL console. Guess what, you can do the same with Ansible. Browse your inventory, and even remote file systems in an interactive shell with ansible-console.
Ansible
Ansible - Vault
I have an Ansible playbook and want to set a password for my brand-new MariaDB instance. Do I need a secret management system like Hashicorp Vault, Bitwarden or something else like gopass?
Podman
Podman - Quadlets
Podman is the daemonless drop-in Docker replacement and has exceptional systemd support. With Quadlets, this support became even better and the hassle to work with systemd unit files is gone. It was never this easy to define your containers as systemd services.
DevOps
DevOps - plain/text (2/2)
One of the major misconceptions of DevOps is, that it is complicated and sophisticated. Quite the contrary is the case. It is also about reducing the cognitive load in a team and doing more with less.
DevOps
DevOps - plain/text (1/2)
Many people think of DevOps as something technical, something complicated and hard to understand. But, it's quite the contrary. DevOps is based on methodologies like Lean or Kanban and aims to make the life easier. But what does this have to do with plaintext?
Ansible
Spotlight - ARA records Ansible
Do you use Ansible? Maybe even in a pipeline or across teams? Chances are high that you might want to track your changes and last runs in a nice overview with ARA. Let's check out the nifty tool and investigate how it can help you with keeping on top.
Podman
Podman - Remote Management
Podman is the daemonless, rootless drop-in replacement for Docker. Furthermore, you can manage containers on a remote machine without connecting to it first. With Podman's remote capabilities, this is just a matter of configuration files.
Ansible
Spotlight - Steampunk Spotter (Ansible)
Ansible is easy, simple, and powerful, right? Sure, and it is a pain to get it right. There are various tools that are meant to help you with Ansible. Let's take a look at Steampunk Spotter, a quality assurance tool, that makes it easy to improve your Ansible playbooks, roles, and collections.
Ansible
Spotlight - Ansible Semaphore
Ansible is a simple, yet proven way to automate your server configuration, cloud deployments and many other things. Yet, most people know Ansible on the command line, which is perfectly fine for CI/CD or if you like to work with text.
DevOps
DevOps - Lifecycle
When it comes to DevOps, most people think of cloud, containers, CI/CD and automation. Well, this is true to some degree, but these are only tools. One of the underlying fundamentals is a proper lifecycle.
Conference
Ansible - Community Day Berlin
Yesterday was the Ansible Community Day in Berlin. I have to say, it was a blast. Meeting the community, talking about all kind of tech-thingies (technical term) and connecting with experts is something I really enjoy.
Ansible
Ansible - Notify the right way
Ansible can trigger tasks based on the execution of other tasks. This feature is known as handlers or notifies. Many examples use this feature in the most minimal way possible, and therefore the power of handlers is pretty much unknown.
Ansible
Ansible - Collections 2/2 (developing)
In the last part of "Ansible - Collection", I talked the reason and usage of collections. Now, let's see how you can create your own collection. Believe me or not, this is easier than creating a bunch of roles and playbooks like it was done in the past.