I have used Ansible for our data center migration and now it’s time to tell the whole department about it.
The problem is that I did not need to make very advanced use of Ansible to automate the big move, and covering it will be rather short and boring.
I have a PowerPoint with Ansible basics already but I would like to find more sophisticated ways to use it for a variety of purposes, and show I can make Ansible live up to its best possibilities in the company.
We have development, devops and ops departments, and we push out application releases constantly and maintain, development, QA, customer test, and production environments. We use Python, mainly. So the possibilities are there.
Any ideas of what topics and examples I should include to sexy things up a bit and engender the interest this amazing too deserves?
I have used Ansible for our data center migration and now it's time to tell
the whole department about it.
The problem is that I did not need to make very advanced use of Ansible to
automate the big move, and covering it will be rather short and boring.
Trust me, "boring" is one of Ansible's best selling points.
I have a PowerPoint with Ansible basics already but I would like to find
more sophisticated ways to use it for a variety of purposes, and show I can
make Ansible live up to its best possibilities in the company.
We have development, devops and ops departments, and we push out application
releases constantly and maintain, development, QA, customer test, and
production environments. We use Python, mainly. So the possibilities are
there.
Any ideas of what topics and examples I should include to sexy things up a
bit and engender the interest this amazing too deserves?
There are a *lot* of presentations out there. Take a look at
slides.com, speakerdeck.com, and slideshare.net and search for
"Ansible". You will find literally hundreds of presentations.
One of my favorites, and I think it's very comprehensive, is from our
friend Xabier:
Nothing works better than hands-on experience itself. For that we created a set if playbooks to generate VM images (vmdk and qcow2) that work on VMware, KVM, VirtualBox, ... and can be cloned as many times as needed. Once booted the VM boots into a menu to pick the role of that VM (master, web, database, ...).
The result being that with a minimum of effort, anyone can turn its laptop into a bunch of networked machines. You designate one the "master" and control the other systems from that master. (The images are made so that there is an automatic trust between all of them).
So within a few minutes, together with your class, you can start to install software, enable services, configure and orchestrate stuff to your liking (and according to your company's standards).
By default we provide a basic walk-through for setting up a deployment
environment based on Ansible, Apache, PHP, MySQL and Git to learn the basics, but it's easy to replace it with your own plan of action.
You can find the workshop playbooks as well as the workshop script at:
for a Ansible Meetup workshop we are doing tomorrow. If you have any questions related to the workshop, let me know. We appreciate any feedback that can help improve the workshop.
