Ansible is IT automation, made simple.
Featuring
Luca is the brain behind awesome projects like Ansible Pilot and AI liberator. He also wrote a couple of books and is present on many community events. Let's find out what motivates Luca to be such a strong part of the community, maybe take a peek behind the scenes and learn about him as a person.
Ansible
Ansible is easy, simple, and powerful, right? Sure, and it is a pain to get it right. There are various tools that are meant to help you with Ansible. Let's take a look at Steampunk Spotter, a quality assurance tool, that makes it easy to improve your Ansible playbooks, roles, and collections.
Ansible
Ansible is a simple, yet proven way to automate your server configuration, cloud deployments and many other things. Yet, most people know Ansible on the command line, which is perfectly fine for CI/CD or if you like to work with text.
Conference
Yesterday was the Ansible Community Day in Berlin. I have to say, it was a blast. Meeting the community, talking about all kind of tech-thingies (technical term) and connecting with experts is something I really enjoy.
Ansible
Ansible can trigger tasks based on the execution of other tasks. This feature is known as handlers or notifies. Many examples use this feature in the most minimal way possible, and therefore the power of handlers is pretty much unknown.
Ansible
In the last part of "Ansible - Collection", I talked the reason and usage of collections. Now, let's see how you can create your own collection. Believe me or not, this is easier than creating a bunch of roles and playbooks like it was done in the past.
Ansible
In the past, and especially on the Chemnitz Linux Days, I was asked about Ansible Collections, a lot. It seems like this topic is somewhat complicated and still unknown. Let's take a look at collections, build one, and showcase how it can make your development easier than ever.
IoT
When it comes to IoT/Edge computing, you have to consider one very special paradigm: "Everything is pull-only". Ansible and Podman can make this work, and we can build a device, that is configured via a Git repository.
Kubernetes
In some past articles, I talked about Kubernetes and how to get started. Minikube is awesome for local development, but what about Kubernetes on small environments? k3s is one of the easiest ways to deploy and run a Kubernetes instance, which can also be used to create high available clusters.
Fedora
Our home server can host a couple of applications now. But, remembering the different addresses, ports, and services seems somewhat wrong. In this article, we will solve this situation by deploying a dashboard, that provides links to all our applications.
Fedora
In the last article, we created a Git server, running in Podman. The deployment was done with Ansible. The article before was about some central infrastructure. This time, let's see how we can have our own File, Calendar, and Contact sync. Yes, we will deploy Nextcloud!
Fedora
Our Home Server is doing some nice stuff already. With the last articles, I want to demonstrate how you can deploy some useful applications on it. Running your own Git server has some advantages, when it comes to private work or testing.
Fedora
With the release of Fedora Linux 37, I switched back to Fedora Silverblue. I took this opportunity to revamp my Fedora Workstation repository and therefore my Ansible playbook for the same.
Fedora
In the last article of our Home Server series, we tackled the deployment of a timeserver. This also provided us with some useful tooling to set up more container deployments. Let's continue on this approach and tackle DNS and DHCP.
Home
Phew, that took a while to get right. I don't want to waste any more of your valuable time. So, let's dig into the deployment of a time, DHCP and DNS server on our home server. Shall we?
Ansible
Let's assume you have a playbook, but you want to use different values for your variables for each time you run it. For example, you want to create a new user on your machines or change the playbook behavior. This can be done, and it is very easy with Ansible Prompts.