A practical Ansible template

This is a practical Ansible template that can be used immediately to support different stages and multiple cloud

Key features

• Segregate different ENV
• Flexiability to support multiple applications
• Multi-cloud supports (GCP, AWS)

Configuration and Pre-requisite

• Python 2.7+
• Ansible 2.7

How to use

Verification of setup

Make sure the inventory/hosts are config with valid IPs first

Pull out the code first

git clone git@github.com:CyanZero/ansible_template.git

Ping some servers to check connectivity

ansible -i local/ tag_web-server -m ping

Run Ansible playbook

Dry run

ansible-playbook -i local/ playbooks/server_conf.yml --diff --check

Confirm the configuration changes and trigger the ansible-playbook tasks

ansible-playbook -i local/ playbooks/server_conf.yml --diff

Ansible structure

• ansible
  • local
    • group_vars
      • all
    • inventory
      • hosts
  • dev_gcp
    • group_vars
      • all
    • inventory
      • hosts
      • gce.py
      • dev_gce.ini
  • staging
  • prod
  • playbooks * site.yml * server_conf.yml
    • roles
      • tasks
        • main.yml
      • templates
        • syslog.conf.tpl
      • handlers
        • handlers.yml
    • common
    • java
    • nginx
    • shared

(Optional) GCP inventory

Configure the GCP access key in gce.ini

• A GCP service account with miminum Compute Engine Editor role
• gce_service_account_email_address = ${email_address}
• gce_service_account_pem_file_path = ${path to gserviceaccount.json}
• gce_project_id = PROJECT NAME

Configure gce.ini location to load GCP VMs into inventory

export GCE_INI_PATH=${path to gce.ini}

Verify setup and inventory

Get the inventory list ./dev_gcp/inventory/gce.py

Practical tips

• Use differnt folder for different ENV, e.g. local, dev and prod
• Roles are shared common tasks
• Assign multiple roles to a host
• Host is a set of instance group
• Use site.yml to run multple playbooks
• Load tasks dynamically by passing in variablies