This document introduces Ansible, an automation tool for configuring and managing computers. It discusses the need for automation in DevOps contexts to efficiently manage an increasing number of systems. Ansible allows automating repetitive tasks across distributed systems using configuration files called playbooks. Playbooks define hosts, variables, tasks and other elements to configure systems idempotently and efficiently at scale. Roles can encapsulate reusable groups of tasks. Ansible uses SSH and requires no agents on managed systems, making it simple and lightweight.

1. ANSIBLE
A TOOL FOR DEV/OPS

2. SESSION OBJECTIVES
Objectives
Present Ansible, a popular tool used in Dev/Ops context
The needs to automate tasks across distributed systems
Typical needs
Ansible use cases for managing Openstack

3. WHAT IS ANSIBLE

4. WHAT IS ANSIBLE
Ansible is a free software platform for configuring and managing
computers.
The platform was created by Michael DeHaan, he is the Cobbler author
as well.

5. THE NEED FOR AUTOMATION

6. TYPICAL NEEDS
As a developer/tester: during dev and test phase.
Safely Do repetitive configurations tasks on a set of VMs implementing a multi-tier cluster
Provision ssh public keys of team members on N freshly deployed nodes during dev phase
Automate a documented complex installation sequence – BTW why writing such a document ? etc
As a Sysadmin/Sysops
Automate remote scripting of many day to day tasks
Check and maintain configuration on systems, can be coupled with a revision management tool
As a Service Delivery team: efficiency
Efficient deployment of complex solutions with easily injecting customers or deal specific configuration parameters
Avoid restarting from start when you hit an error
Do it faster and cheaper and at scale
As <anyone>
Be efficient in front of the explosion of the # of entities (servers, VMs, ...) to ‘manage’

7. THE AVAILABLE TOOLS
ANDKEY PROPERTIES
The ‘old ways’ we all experimented: is gone
Document the pre-requisites, document the sequence of actions.
Keeping the doc up to date and tested is time consuming. Doc is subject to interpretation, ...
Shell scripting
Handling errors correctly is hard. Designing them to avoid restart from scratch is even harder
The current way: Configuration management and automation frameworks.
Puppet, Chef, Salt,
All promote idempotency
Ansible addresses most of the issues at low cost
Easy to learn and debug
Open source software (with commercial support available)
Leaves no “fingerprints” or residue on target systems
Predictable execution / Repeatable / Idempotent Mostly / Parallel operations
Ansible

8. ANSIBLE BASICS AND KEY CONCEPTS

9. ANSIBLE ARCHITECTURE AND WORKING MODEL
An ‘orchestration engine’ where Ansible SW
is installed.
No agent required. leverage ssh as default
secure transport.
Execute playbooks.
Predictable – in order execution
Designed to work in push mode to all target
hosts in parallel.
hosts can be many things:
Any Linux/*Nix systems
networking gears running sshd
Windows hosts by leverging WinRM and PowerShell
(hence no ssh in that case)
And more...

10. THE INVENTORY
WHERE THE HOSTS ARE REGISTERED
ABOUTINVENTORIES
Static inventory:
A file containing a set of hosts and groups of hosts.
Can also contain some host specific settings.
Common practice is to name groups per intended
function.
Dynamic inventory – hosts and groups from
external source via inventory plugin.
From a CMDB
From a cloud provider (e.g: AWS EC2/Eucalyptus,
Rackspace Cloud. OpenStack nova, gce, digital ocean ...)
Useful when hosts names are hard to predict or when
many hosts
More than one inventory and mix of static
and dynamic inventory sources is possible:
One for development, one for staging, one for production
One for public cloud one for private cloud
EXAMPLE OF ASIMPLE STATIC INVENTORY – NO DBNEEDED
# This is a comment
# localhost refers to the ansible control node
localhost
[webservers]
www1.example.com
www2.example.com
www[10:50].example.com
[dbservers]
db1.example.com
db[a:f].example.com
10.0.1.9 ansible_ssh_port=2222 ansible_ssh_user=admin
[LinuxVMs]
localhost
db1.example.com
www21.example.com

11. ANSIBLE PLAYBOOKS - THE PLAYS
ALISTOF PLAYS TO RUN ON TARGETHOSTS
Playbooks are yaml text files containing a list
of plays and run via the ansible-playbook cli
Playbooks can be hierarchical and use
structured directory and file layout.
A play maps a set of hosts with “what to
execute” on them
Has a name: descriptive text
Start with a section specifying the set of target hosts with
the parameters to access them.
May contain variables declaration sections
Contains sections specifying “what to run” on them
A play optionally ‘gather Facts’ and makes
them available as variables. Facts are all the
information Ansible discovers about a host.
Each play is run in sequence and may specify
the account (remote_user) to be used to
connect to the remote hosts, if sudo is
needed, etc
PLAYBOOKEXTRACT– THE FIRSTSECTION OF APLAY
­ name: This is the PLAY1 title
hosts: webservers # this can be host, groups or complex expr
gather_facts: True # trigger facts discovery about targets
remote_user tester # connect as 'tester' account
sudo: False # whether to run as sudo or not
[...skipped part...] # what to run on the targets – skipped
­ name: This is the PLAY2 Title
hosts: dbservers:!db1.example.com # exclude a host
gather_facts: False
remote_user: admin # connect as 'admin' account
sudo: True
[...skipped part...] # what to run on the targets – skipped

12. ANSIBLE PLAYBOOKS – THE TASKS
WHATTO RUN ON TARGETHOSTS
The tasks section describes the list of actions
you want to execute on the target hosts
The tasks are run in order, one at a time,
against all the target hosts in parallel, before
moving to the next.
A task:
Has a name : descriptive text
Executes a module with specific parameters.
Reports status [ok, changed, failed, skipping] at runtime
Handlers are tasks triggered at the end of
the play if a change was made
A is a small program, generally
idempotent and that can be written in any
language *.
There are modules for many things, see the
module index. You can write your own.
Variables and templates leverage jinja2
templating engine
module
THE NTP SIMPLE EXAMPLE
­ name: Setup ntp client
hosts: linuxVMs:!localhost # target hosts
remote_user: tester # connect as ‘tester’ account
sudo: True # and need sudo capability
vars:
­ time_sources: [ntp2.austin.hp.com, gpsclock0.sdd.hp.com, ntp1
­ ntp_rpm: ntp
tasks:
­ name: Install the required time service package
yum: name={{ ntp_rpm }} state=installed
­ name: Instantiate the ntp.conf from template file
template: src=ntp.conf.j2 dest=/etc/ntp.conf
notify:
­ restart time server daemon
­ name: The os are we running on
debug: msg=“this is a {{ ansible_distribution }} {{ ansible_
handlers:
­ name: restart time server daemon
service: name=ntpd state=restarted enabled=yes

13. ANSIBLE ROLES
PARAMETERIZEDTASKS FORSHARINGANDREUSE
Rapidly you will need to reuse some tasks, or
abstract some consecutive tasks and give it
a name.
A role is materialized as a set of structured
files and may have:
A set of defaults (aka default values)
A tasks list
handlers
Templates files
files
meta
vars
This works like an clever include directive
Hint: browse the roles
repository and use the ansible-galaxy cli to
get them.
Openstack playbooks :
Ansible Galaxy
https://github.com/openstack/openstack-
ansible
THE NTP SIMPLE EXAMPLE
­ name: Setup ntp client
hosts: linuxVMs
# target hosts
remote_user: tester # connect as ‘tester’ account
sudo: True # and need sudo
vars:
­ other_clocks: [ntp1aus2.hp.net, gpsclock0.sdd.hp.com, ntp1.ed
roles:
­ {role: ntpclient, time_sources: “{{ other_clocks }}”, }
tasks:
­ name: The os are we running on
debug: msg=“this is a {{ansible_distribution}} {{ansible_dis
­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ the roles/ntplient sub directory content ­­­­­­
roles/ntpclient
├── defaults
│
└── main.yml ­> content is vars section on previous slide
├── handlers
│
└── main.yml ­> content is the handler section on previous slide
├── tasks
│
└── main.yml ­> content is the tasks section on previous slide

14. ANSIBLE - A LOT MORE TO DISCOVER
WE JUST SCRATCHED THE SURFACE
Ansible conditionals
Ansible loops
Ansible-Vault
Facts
Jinja2 filters
...

15. SIMPLE LIVE EXAMPLES

16. THANK YOU
Based on original presentation from :
Philippe Eveque <philippe.eveque@hp.com>
Adaptation to openstack by :
Jérome Justet <jerome.justet@hp.com>
René Ribaud <rene.ribaud@hp.com>