A presentation on how Ansible can be used to provision environments in EC2 that make use of PHP.

1. Ansible, EC2 and PHP
Easy Orchestration
www.bipsync.com

2. www.bipsync.com

3. IANAL
www.bipsync.com

4. IANASWANB
www.bipsync.com

5. In March 2014…
www.bipsync.com
• Ad hoc local development in OS X
• Hand-built production systems in AWS
• Various installation notes kept in wiki

6. And now…
www.bipsync.com
• Local development in Vagrant VMs
• Virtual Machines provisioned by Ansible playbooks
• Production systems provisioned by playbooks
• Ansible playbooks are living documentation

7. Application environment
www.bipsync.com
• Hosted in Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
• Load balanced application web servers
• Worker instances
• Search cluster
• Database cluster

8. www.bipsync.com
App
Worker
Database
Vagrant VM
Search

9. www.bipsync.com
App App
Worker Search
Database
Load
Balancer
VPC
DatabaseDatabase
Search

10. Ansible tasks
www.bipsync.com
- name: Install php-fpm and dependencies
!
yum: name={{ item }} state=present
!
with_items:
!
- php
!
- php-fpm
!
- php-mysql

11. Ansible playbooks
www.bipsync.com
- name: Install MySQL, Nginx, and PHP-FPM
hosts: webservers
roles:
!
- common
!
- mysql
!
- nginx
!
- php-fpm

12. Provisioning Vagrant VMs
www.bipsync.com
1. Define an Ansible playbook
2. Define a vagrant configuration file which runs the
playbook
3. vagrant up

13. Provisioning in EC2
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1. Define an Ansible playbook
2. Create an instance from an Amazon Machine Image
(AMI) within a given subnet
3. Store relevant outcomes as facts - allows us to refer
to them later in the playbook
4. Wait until SSH is available, perform additional
provisioning

14. Demo
www.bipsync.com

15. Taking it further
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1. Master playbook includes playbooks sequentially
2. Facts are maintained from one playbook to the next
3. Once all resources are available, configuration
playbooks use facts to connect them together

16. www.bipsync.com
deploy_all.yml
deploy_vpc.yml deploy_elb.yml deploy_app.yml
deploy_worker.ymldeploy_search.ymldeploy_db.yml
configure.yml

17. Demo
www.bipsync.com

18. Provisioning PHP
www.bipsync.com
• Bipsync’s OS of choice is Ubuntu
• We use semi-official packages from https://
launchpad.net/~ondrej/+archive/ubuntu/php5
• Installation (PHP-FPM, PECL, config) is pretty
straightforward…
• But not totally straightforward

19. Demo
www.bipsync.com

20. What else do we do?
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• Install and configure Supervisor for long running tasks
• Cron jobs
• Upgrades
• Migrations
• Continuous integration

21. Why is this cool?
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1. Lowers risk
2. Breaks down barriers
3. Enhances scalability
4. Fits the programmer’s mindset
5. Lots of scrolling text on your terminal

22. Words of warning
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• Beware Ansible bugs - turn on termination protection
• Provisioning can take time - make use of AMIs
• Costs can escalate quickly - look at Eucalyptus
• It’s not programming, it’s scripting

23. Further Reading
www.bipsync.com
• Ansible Up and Running (Loren Hochstein) -
Free preview at http://www.ansible.com/ansible-book
• Vagrant Cookbook (Erika Heidi)
• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ansible-
project

24. Thanks! Questions?
!
@craigmarvelley
@neveroutofbeta
https://www.bipsync.com