Ansible Best Practices

Ansible Best Practices

In this technological world, Ansible is considering computer automation and a framework for operation and deployment. It is designed for multi-stage deployment and organizes your IT infrastructure, describing how all your systems are more reliant rather than interdependent. Probably, written in Python, not used by any agent. It uses a targeted SSH server and does not require additional personal security infrastructure to facilitate deployment. 

Everything in Ansible is possible in one way of administration, distribution and implementation. You do not need daemons or other software to run the remote control of the machine. Because it uses SSH, security audits are easy to pass and can be used in non-compliant areas with custom KPI infrastructure to run root size. Responsible modules can be written not only in ruby or python but also in any language that is effective for restoring a JSON or key. In this way, Ansible manages to avoid a popular war between Python and Ruby and arouses interest in them.

Ansible – Best Practices

Following are the best practices of the Ansible to get the most benefits:

Use Multiple Roles

Although you can write your Playbooks in one familiar file, this is considered bad practice. And not without reason: the new is harder to read, and keep. When designing web application updates you should first consider dividing the various elements into roles, regardless of the size of their role. A common role is something that you probably give your machines the basic prerequisites you want or need. Other roles are quite self-explanatory as they describe the specific services you need.

This is from the beginning and more useful if you are always editing books if you know there is no reason to restart the whole book because you just want to change the database. It pays off later because you can update individual roles without restarting the entire book. In principle, roles may depend on previous roles, but in practice, this only applies to roles like “Normal” and you don’t interfere much in roles.

Write Roles in Product Format

As soon as you start writing the Ansible role, it’s very tempting to put everything in the same role so you have some sort of reusable tool. In fact, you need to separate the role according to the technical part: Mongo-DB, one for HA-Proxy, and the other for Tomcat, and then use the glue offered by the Playbook to compose and describe the behaviors you are looking for. This separation allows you to combine all the management tasks required for a particular component: installation, configuration, startup, shutdown, upgrade, maintenance … and only that part.

If your code needs to work on another technical side, try moving it to another role as soon as possible. If you need to organize these tasks by roles, write a role, and the only purpose is to call up the functions of the other roles. The purpose of this separation is to reduce the interdependence between technical roles and products by reducing the parameters required for its implementation. Lastly, it allows you to use the features we are looking for much faster.

Don’t Wait For User Input

In several cases, we thought it would be good to use random excerpts from the unit in your role. It’s a bad idea because it slows down enforcement – you forget where those who “wait for the user to use” and start making a playbook plan to make coffee, come back later and discover it’s stuck somewhere on a writing board in the middle of a book. It is a much better idea to use var_prompt at the beginning of the song. Use the default value of var_prompts

Practice Defaults for var_prompts

When using var_prompt, it is a good idea to set default values for each stimulus. For example, suppose you ask users to list the URLs of all the certificates we upload to our offered nodes. Every time you run a songbook, a lot of harassment starts, even if you only have a certain role or label, so it’s boring to get to those songs. These little things are useful, especially when debugging if you just want to restart a certain operation and you don’t have to worry about user entry.

Use Cloud Components

It supports a large set of units that you can use out of the box and includes a special set of units designed to help provide cloud bags to various service providers. Even if you don’t have to be flexible (up and down) to achieve your goals, it’s good to use the power of these units to achieve your goals, even if you don’t have them as just one example. Because cloud components make this task easier, there is no reason to manually configure nodes from different companies in the cloud and obtain their IP addresses to insert them into an available file. As with all the tips in this article, the goal is to reduce the “human contribution” as much as possible and automate everything.

Why Ansible – Over Other Frameworks?

  • A possible goal is a simple design and is powered from any open-source entity that supports services, applications, hardware, networks, connections, etc.
  • Server-side is not required. All you need to run the module in Python. The standard connection type is SSH, but custom units are available for other models.
  • Flat learning history – Once you understand the basic concepts and know the commands/steps to configure manual hosting, it’s easy to start writing the same steps in YAML response format.
  • Simple, Ansible combines a set of machines (files) and a list of qualified tasks that can be customized to variables, allowing you to use a predefined project or extension. 

Conclusion

Together, we have found that regular use of Ansible provides good practices that facilitate the daily use of these devices. The possible simplicity and ability to reduce the complexity of other devices have made it a reliable candidate for your environment. The main concern is safety and reliability. It uses Open-SSH for transportation, and the language is designed to be heard even by those unfamiliar with the program. However, it is believed that Ansible certification is very convenient for managing small settings, in a handful of cases and a corporate environment.