The document discusses automating server provisioning and configuration using Ansible playbooks. It recommends developing playbooks using Vagrant to easily create, boot, and destroy virtual machines. Playbooks can then be run against real servers on Red Hat to provision them in a repeatable, documented process. Lessons learned are that Ansible playbooks serve as great infrastructure documentation and help refine the setup, and it's important to ensure playbooks are idempotent and prefer using modules over raw commands.

1. Automated provisioning and
deployment
E2E Testing Team

2. Why?
• Complex configuration: users, GIBA proxy, database, database
seeding, Test Center, Scheduler, deployment scripts.
• We wanted:
• Server configuration as code and under version control.
• Provision a new IPC host in minutes.
• Repeatable process.

3. Ansible setup
• Automates provisioning, configuration and deployment.
• A controller node, which acts as a provisioner.
• One (or many) managed hosts.
• No agents needed. Instructions on playbooks are translated to
commands through SSH.

4. How to develop?
• Vagrant project with Virtual Box as virtualization provider.
• Vagrant sits on top of the virtualization provider.
• CentOS as base box.
• Vagrantfile:
• Ruby file that declares:
• A controller VM.
• A node VM.
• It’s very easy to create the VMs from scratch, boot them, and destroy them
• $ vagrant up controller
• $ vagrant up node
• $ vagrant destroy node

5. Our playbooks

7. How to run against IPC?
• Request new Red Hat instance.
• Create a snapshot.
• Try.
• Revert.

8. Lessons learnt
• Ansible playbooks are the best documentation for infrastructure.
• It helps to improve/refine the infrastructural set-up.
• Always check for idempotency!
• It’s better to use a module than running a raw command.