Ansible Hands-On Training

Learn by doing. A step-by-step set of training exercises that take you from the basics to a fully built web application server.

Project and Build Status

• GitHub repo: https://github.com/glenjarvis/ansible_hands_on_training/
• Free software: LICENSE

Welcome

Successfully automating your machines in the cloud using Ansible. Start with the bascis of 'ssh' to access the machine, build up to Ansible modules, and then playbooks. You will progress to roles and custom modules for better organization.

Videos of Talk

Even though the exercises have been updated to work with modern versions of Ansible and Python 3, there are currently no videos to match the exercises. There are videos, however, from 2014 for basic concepts:

Slow Walkthrough

Same material / Digestible pace / Longer Video:

• 9-Aug, 2014 Hands-On Training

Fast Overview

Same material / Quickly covered / Shorter Video:

• 26-June, 2014 Bay Area Python Interest Group (BayPIGgies)/Silicon Valley Python MeetUp Video

Prerequisites

The exercises in this repository have been tested against an Amazon AMI. The decision to use an Amazon instances are:

• They are kept current by Amazon
• They are very cheap to spin up to do a test (less than 4 cents for this training session). Free if it's an Amazon account that is less than 1 year old. Please remember to TERMINATE your instance when finished.
• We are using 'yum' as a package installer in the earlier exercises (to keep different variations at a minimum). We later learn how to be more universal.
• We need a standard to avoid the complications of too many choices to configure

You are welcome to use any host that you wish for these exercises. However, to avoid confusion where playbooks will not work (e.g., package names differ, yum isn't supported, etc.), I suggest that you use:

Amazon Linux AMI 2018.03.0 (HVM), SSD Volume Type - ami-00eb20669e0990cb4

The t2.micro size is sufficient for these exercises and is what is used for testing.

If you do not know how to build an AWS instance, this video will help you:

• Building an AWS Instance

Hands-On Training

• No sessions currently scheduled

Talk description

As we have seen with the previous talk, "Red Pill, Blue Pill Virtual Machines and Virtual Environments" (GitHub / YouTube), we can create virtual machines in the cloud.

But, how do you "stamp" those machines differently? If you need to build a web server, mail server, DNS server, and load balancer, each machine may have the same base image but needs to be configured differently.

If you manually configure those machines, what happens when you suddenly have a surge in traffic and need four more web servers? Or, what if one finds a vulnerability in a library like Heartbleed in OpenSSL? A very safe option would be to rebuild these machines from scratch. If they were built manually, rebuilding these machines within minutes from scratch would be daunting, tedious and error prone.

There are several tools that have been built to fix this problem. Two of the most popular tools, Chef and Puppet, are written in the Ruby programming language. And, especially for the most popular, Chef, one needs somewhat of a familiarity with that language to use the tool.

There are two more tools that are written in Python and are growing in popularity: Salt and Ansible. Ansible requires the least amount of set-up (if any) and has the simplest infrastructure (it simply uses commands over ssh like Fabric does). Ansible is the easiest tool to get started with if you are new in the machine build automation frameworks.

We will start with a newly built machine and obtain it's public IP address. We will configure the ansible_hosts file with the IP address, and add/build plays (like recipes) to gradually configure that machine so that it is a Django web server running in the cloud. When we are finished, we should have a running machine and a recipe to easily build a seconded machine with a few keystrokes.

P.S. If you haven't previously built an Amazon Web Instance, I highly recommend watching this video in advance of the talk.

Getting Started (Installing and following-along)

1. Clone this repo to the directory you would like to have your work in.

   $ git clone https://github.com/glenjarvis/ansible_hands_on_training.git
   Cloning into 'ansible_hands_on_training'...
   remote: Reusing existing pack: 112, done.
   remote: Total 112 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
   Receiving objects: 100% (112/112), 37.58 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
   Resolving deltas: 100% (48/48), done.
   Checking connectivity... done.

2. Make a virtualenv named venv for your Python environment of choice.

   • For Python3:

     $ python3 -m venv venv
     

   Note: Python 2 support has been dropped from this project. Only Python 3

   is supported.

3. Activate the Virtual Enviroment. Every time you come back to work on this project, you will need to activate your virtual environment:

   $ cd <full path to this repo>
   $ source venv/bin/activate
   

   When the Virtual Environment is activated, you should see venv in the prompt. It may look something to this:

   (venv) $
   

   (OPTIONAL) I often like to be able to jump to this folder quickly from anywhere and have it automatically setup my virtual environment. So, I put something like this in my $HOME/.bashrc (or equivalent) file:

   function cd_ansible_hands_on_training {
       deactivate 2> /dev/null
       cd /FULL_PATH_TO_THIS_DIRECTORY
       source venv/bin/activate
   }

4. Upgrade Pip. The Pip that comes with a new Virtual Environment is often too old. Upgrade it to be sure it is current:

   (venv)$ pip install --upgrade pip
   Collecting pip
     Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/0f/74/ecd13431bcc456ed390b44c8a6e917c1820365cbebcb6a8974d1cd045ab4/pip-10.0.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl
   Installing collected packages: pip
     Found existing installation: pip 9.0.3
       Uninstalling pip-9.0.3:
         Successfully uninstalled pip-9.0.3
   Successfully installed pip-10.0.1

5. Configure the repo for your account and settings

   (venv)$ ( cd src; python configure.py )
   
   This script creates configuration files for using Ansible to
   configure a newly-created virtual machine.
   It has been tested by the author on an AWS free tier VM.
   This has the best chance of working on an AWS free tier VM, or
   failing that, on a VM with a recent version of CentOS.
   
   No configuration file found. Let me ask questions so that we can configure.
   
   What is the path to your .pem key file for  the virtual machine?
   --> ~/example_key.pem
   
   What user to use to ssh to the remote system [ec2-user]?
   -->
   Configuring `ansible_hosts` file ./ansible_hosts...
   
   What is the IP address of the virtual machine?
   --> demos.glenjarvis.com
   
   Configuration is complete.

6. Follow the examples (starting with the example_01 subdirectory).

Bio

Glen has been a Python programmer since 2007 and has worked for companies such as IBM, UC Berkeley, Sprint, Informix, and many start-ups. He has also worked both in the US and in the UK and has had Bioinformatics research published in Nucleic Acids Research (Oxford Journals) He is a certified DBA and has also been certified in Linux/Unix Administration.

He is a DevOps engineer and uses Ansible heavily. Additionally, he runs a start up, Glen Jarvis Training & Consulting, LLC.

Glen is the organizer for the Silicon Valley Python MeetUp Group and a co-organizer of the Bay Area Python Interest Group.

More information:

• GlenJarvis.com
• GitHub
• LinkedIn

Make this better by Contributing

This is an Open Source project and contributions are always welcome, and they are greatly appreciated! Every little bit helps, and credit will always be given.

You can contribute in many ways:

• Report bugs
• Write Documentation
• Fix bugs
• CONTRIBUTING