A useful Ansible snippet - splitting a variable value in Ansible. the stuffs - splitting a variable using .split Let’s paint a picture. Say there’s an application that needs upgraded. It’s distributed via a tarball. There is a service setup using a symlink - software -> software-1.2.3. The workflow would be something like… Untar a file. Change the symlink to point to the new folder (software -> software-2.0.0). There’s already a variable for the tar file name.

Using Ansible Container, Ansible, and AWS, deploy a personal VPN server, while also creates a specified user, the appropriate OpenVPN configuration file, and saves it to the local user’s desktop. background Having a personal VPN server is immensely useful; we live in a mobile world with plenty of wifi hotspots. With these open access points, security is definitely a large issue. There are VPN services available, but it is often desirable to manage our own service.

A spin off from Ansible SSH bastion host for dynamic infrastructure in AWS, this post documents how to gather EC2 instance SSH public key from the AWS System Log. background For a while I was stumped at how to deal with AWS, AMIs and SSH fingerprints/public keys. Initially, it was through pre-baked AMIs. But what if pre-baking AMIs isn’t realistic? Or the AMIs are baked without SSH host keys generated and aren’t known?

Using Ansible to manage internal VPC private instances without using VPNs, by deploying a SSH proxy bastion host. background When dealing with a web stack or AWS infrastructure, how are private instances that do NOT need a public IP address managed? It’s not an extremely difficult question. In many cases VPNs are used for this purpose. But what if a VPN isn’t needed? It’s arguably overkill and it can introduce a lot of overhead, creating multiple site-to-site VPNs and linking various regions together.

I use AWS infrastructure as a service (IaaS) heavily, both personally and professionally. I have a slew of all different types of instances, doing different types of things. In many cases, I’ll want backups; basically, AWS snapshots. I needed a way to quickly create and manage backups through the use of AWS snapshots in an automated fashion. Sounds like a job for Ansible - and that’s exactly what I did. I wrote a playbook to handle all of this management.

2017-03-16 UPDATE - this is an old, unmanaged project. Use as a reference only. Mostly using Kubernetes now. Using Rancher, a container management platform, to deploy a dockerized ELK stack to AWS using Ansible. Background In certain scenarios, deploying Docker containers to infrastructure can be trickier than expected. Take an Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana (ELK) stack. Three docker containers, straight forward. Running a simple docker compose and our stack can be up without issue.

Automating the creation and updating of AWS AMI images uses Ansible. the problem One of the first problems when deploying anything is managing the base image. The gold load. The template. The thing that all systems are created from. Since we’re operating in AWS, our story begins with AMIs. We use AMIs. From those AMIs, instances are built and configured. We want to optimize this configuration process, so it makes sense to pre-configure our AMIs as much as possible.

overview I’ve been thinking about dynamic inventories and Ansible, especially when using AWS. One major difference between static IT infrastructures and dynamic AWS infrastructures is that IP addresses may change, instances may be terminated, and things just flat out change. Your resources are a moving target. Finding those instances/servers/VMs is the first step in managing your inventory. Ansible has a great tool for this, “ec2.py”. It basically pulls information on instances in AWS at runtime (as -i .