Ansible can solve almost any automation challenge, but we will focus on how simply this can be done. The talk will cover one-liners and other tricks that can be added to your virtual toolbox. There will also be a discussion so come with your own favorite tip or trick for the group that leverage Ansible. presented by... Mike Dahlgren.. "Almost two decades he bought a simple red fedora from the back of a 'Teach Yourself Linux' book, now he lives that dream at Red Hat as a Senior Cloud Solution Architect. His passion for evangelizing the benefits Open Source has never wavered through a career in private, public, and government agencies."

1. Mike Dahlgren - miked@redhat.com
Tips and Tricks

3. @KeithResar
Automating F5 Load Balancers
Automating your F5 Local traffic managers using Ansible.
Ready to run your first playbook?
Come and see what F5 Networks has been up to with ansible
playbooks. We will discuss and demo all the cool things you can
automate on your BIG-IP.
...presented on June 21st

4. @KeithResar

5. @KeithResar

6. @KeithResar

7. Mike Dahlgren - miked@redhat.com
Now for the Tips and Tricks

8. Running Commands in Parallel

9. PARALLELISM AND STRATEGIES COMMANDS
Number of forks can easily be defined with -f (default is 5)
$ ansible webservers -a "/sbin/reboot" -f 10
Strategies can be used to control play execution an can be changed
• Lineary strategy = in order execution (Default)
• Free strategy = finish as fast as you can
- hosts: all
strategy: free
tasks:
...

10. Removing Files & Directories

11. Removing a file from a server
Easy for one File:
$ ansible webservers -m file -a "dest=/path/to/file
state=absent"

12. Removing all the files and directory
- name: remove files and directories
file:
state: "{{ item }}"
path: "/srv/deleteme/"
owner: 1000 # set your owner, group, and mode
group: 1000
mode: '0777'
with_items:
- absent
- directory

13. Overloading the Ansible config

14. Set Defaults in a custom Ansible configuration file.
• No need to type -i myhosts from the CLI
• Remove the useless .retry files
• Can be used anywhere you run Ansible
Precedence model:
* ANSIBLE_CONFIG (an environment variable)
* ansible.cfg (in the current directory)
* .ansible.cfg (in the home directory)
* /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg

15. Forking background processes
from the command line

16. TIME LIMITING BACKGROUND OPERATIONS
Run script in background (30 Min timeout)
$ ansible webserver -B 3600 -P 0 -a "/bin/long_cmd --do-stuff"
Checking on the status of a previous job
$ ansible web1.example.com -m async_status -a "jid=488359678239.2844"
We can set how often to poll the status (60 seconds)
$ ansible webserver -B 1800 -P 60 -a "/bin/long_cmd --do-stuff"

17. Clean up your debugging tasks

18. Clean up your debugging tasks
- debug:
msg: "This always displays"
- debug:
msg: "This only displays with
ansible-playbook -vv+"
verbosity: 2

19. Use smoke tests

20. Don’t just start services -- use smoke tests
- name: check for proper response
uri:
url: http://localhost/myapp
return_content: yes
register: result
until: '"Hello World" in result.content'
retries: 10
delay: 1

21. Use Patterns

22. Use patterns quickly and effectively - Continued
Wildcards work
one*.com:dbservers
So can Regex
~(web|db).*.example.com
But would this work?
www[01:50].example.com, db-[a:f].example.com

23. Abusing Regex

24. Moving Drive letters in a Puppet Manifest
vars:
alphabet: "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
tasks:
- block:
- name: change disk names
replace:
path: /etc/puppet/example/{{ hostname
}}.yaml
regexp: 'sd{{ alphabet[item | int + 1] }}'
replace: 'sd{{ alphabet[item | int] }}'
with_sequence: start=0 end=11

25. Leveraging Jinja2

26. Flow Control in Templates
{% for port in jmx_ports %}
<Connection>
ServiceURL "service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://{{
inventory_hostname }}.example.com:{{ port }}/jmxrmi"
Host "{{ inventory_hostname }}.example.com"
InstancePrefix "port_{{ port }}"
Collect "memory"
Collect "threads"
Collect "classes"
</Connection>
{% endfor %}

27. TASK [command]
*********************************
[WARNING]: Consider using yum module rather
than running yum
changed: [localhost]
@KeithResar

28. - hosts: all
tasks:
- command: yum -y install telnet
- yum: name=telnet state=present
- command: yum -y install telnet
args:
warn: False
@KeithResar

29. What is your favorite Trick?