I’m new to Ansible. I can create one VM using Ansible. I’d like to deploy multiple VMs at one go. I’d appreciate any references or guidelines to accomplish this.
Take a look through the cloud modules.
Which module applies to you depends on your infrastructure provider (i.e. vsphere, aws, gcp, libvirt, etc)
For example:
virt for libvirt
cloudformation for aws
vsphere_guest for vsphere
azure_rm_deployment for azure
...and many more
There are also tons of community developed roles at ansible-galaxy if the above don't quite meet your use case.
Related
I've bitbucket repository, bitbucket pipeline there and EC2 instance. EC2 have access to the repository ( can perform pull and docker build/run)
So it seems I only need to upload to EC2 some bash scripts and call it from bitbucket pipeline. How can I call it? Usually ssh connection is used to perform scripts on EC2, is it applicable from bitbucket pipeline? Is it a good solution?
two ways to solve this problem, I will leave it up to you.
I see you are using AWS, and AWS has a nice service called CodeDeploy. you can use that and create a few deployment scripts and then integrate it with your pipeline. Problem with it is that it is an agent that needs to be installed. so it will consume some resource not much but if u are looking at an agentless design then this solution wont work. you can check the example in the following answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/68933031/8248700
You can use something like Python Fabric (its a small gun) or Ansible (its a big canon) to achieve this. it is an agentless design works purely on SSH.
I'm using both the approaches for different scenarios. For AWS I use CodeDeploy and for any other cloud vendor I use Python Fabric. (We can use CodeDeploy on other than AWS but then it comes under on-premise pricing for which it charges for per deployment)
I hope this brings some clarity.
I need to install and configure all new system start with auto-scaling in aws as per the requirements , like if it is a app server install nodejs with respective git code for deployment using with Ansible.
How Ansible identify a new system came up and need to do this all configuration.
Here is a guide from ansible docs how to handle autoscaling with Ansible: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/scenario_guides/guide_aws.html#autoscaling-with-ansible-pull
The problem on this approch is, that you need the whole provisining prozess on startup. This takes much time and is error prone.
A common solution is to build a custom AMI with all infrastructure needed for your service and only deploy your current code to this maschine.
A good tool to build custom AMIs is Packer. A Guide for AWS is available here. https://www.packer.io/docs/builders/amazon.html
At work we use Amazon linux Ec2 instances for production purposes. Also, for our internal dev setup we use openstack Cent OS instances.
I want to make a common CLI or expose REST APIs to start and stop instances on both these cloudstacks. (I already have machine images). I understand I can use any of the common SDKs (I plan to use GO) and build this.
Recently, I came across this. I am just wondering if such a thing is already available. Or does the above repo mean something else? There have been also some other articles which mention EC2 support for openstack. I am not sure if it means the same as I what I want to achieve.
There already is some compatibility with ec2 command line clients, for Nova, what you have linked to expands on that to include some network functions (VPC etc.), and openstack heat is compatible with some aws cloudformation templates.
have you looked at euca2ools? - this client was developed by Eucalyptus cloud and is compatible with AWS and nova EC2
My organization's website is a Django app running on front end webservers + a few background processing servers in AWS.
We're currently using Ansible for both :
system configuration (from a bare OS image)
frequent manually-triggered code deployments.
The same Ansible playbook is able to provision either a local Vagrant dev VM, or a production EC2 instance from scratch.
We now want to implement autoscaling in EC2, and that requires some changes towards a "treat servers as cattle, not pets" philosophy.
The first prerequisite was to move from a statically managed Ansible inventory to a dynamic, EC2 API-based one, done.
The next big question is how to deploy in this new world where throwaway instances come up & down in the middle of the night. The options I can think of are :
Bake a new fully-deployed AMI for each deploy, create a new AS Launch config and update the AS group with that. Sounds very, very cumbersome, but also very reliable because of the clean slate approach, and will ensure that any system changes the code requires will be here. Also, no additional steps needed on instance bootup, so up & running more quickly.
Use a base AMI that doesn't change very often, automatically get the latest app code from git upon bootup, start webserver. Once it's up just do manual deploys as needed, like before. But what if the new code depends on a change in the system config (new package, permissions, etc) ? Looks like you have to start taking care of dependencies between code versions and system/AMI versions, whereas the "just do a full ansible run" approach was more integrated and more reliable. Is it more than just a potential headache in practice ?
Use Docker ? I have a strong hunch it can be useful, but I'm not sure yet how it would fit our picture. We're a relatively self-contained Django front-end app with just RabbitMQ + memcache as services, which we're never going to run on the same host anyway. So what benefits are there in building a Docker image using Ansible that contains system packages + latest code, rather than having Ansible just do it directly on an EC2 instance ?
How do you do it ? Any insights / best practices ?
Thanks !
This question is very opinion based. But just to give you my take, I would just go with prebaking the AMIs with Ansible and then use CloudFormation to deploy your stacks with Autoscaling, Monitoring and your pre-baked AMIs. The advantage of this is that if you have most of the application stack pre-baked into the AMI autoscaling UP will happen faster.
Docker is another approach but in my opinion it adds an extra layer in your application that you may not need if you are already using EC2. Docker can be really useful if you say want to containerize in a single server. Maybe you have some extra capacity in a server and Docker will allow you to run that extra application on the same server without interfering with existing ones.
Having said that some people find Docker useful not in the sort of way to optimize the resources in a single server but rather in a sort of way that it allows you to pre-bake your applications in containers. So when you do deploy a new version or new code all you have to do is copy/replicate these docker containers across your servers, then stop the old container versions and start the new container versions.
My two cents.
A hybrid solution may give you the desired result. Store the head docker image in S3, prebake the AMI with a simple fetch and run script on start (or pass it into a stock AMI with user-data). Version control by moving the head image to your latest stable version, you could probably also implement test stacks of new versions by making the fetch script smart enough to identify which docker version to fetch based on instance tags which are configurable at instance launch.
You can also use AWS CodeDeploy with AutoScaling and your build server. We use CodeDeploy plugin for Jenkins.
This setup allows you to:
perform your build in Jenkins
upload to S3 bucket
deploy to all the EC2s one by one which are part of the assigned AWS Auto-Scaling group.
All that with a push of a button!
Here is the AWS tutorial: Deploy an Application to an Auto Scaling Group Using AWS CodeDeploy
When autoscaling my EC2 instances for application, what is the best way to keep every instances in sync?
For example, there are custom settings and application files like below...
Apache httpd.conf
php.ini
PHP source for my application
To get my autoscaling working, all of these must be configured same in each EC2 instances, and I want to know the best practice to sync these elements.
You could use a private AMI which contains scripts that install software or checkout the code from SVN, etc.. The second possibility to use a deployment framework like chef or puppet.
The way this works with Amazon EC2 is that you can pass user-data to each instance -- generally a script of some sort to run commands, e.g. for bootstrapping. As far as I can see CreateLaunchConfiguration allows you to define that as well.
If running this yourself is too much of an obstacle, I'd recommend a service like:
scalarium
rightscale
scalr (also opensource)
They all offer some form of scaling.
HTH