How I Provision My MacBook with Ansible
Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of speaking at the London Ansible Meetup on the topic of provisioning my MacBook with Ansible.
Post-Apocalyptic Cowsay
While tidying up my mac-ansible repository in preparation for a talk I’m giving on it at the London Ansible Meetup tonight, I found my two-headed cow. It’s a bit of ASCII fan-art I made for the Fallout game series, whose post-apocalyptic setting has all the cows mutated this way.
Writing a Custom Ansible Dynamic Inventory Script
I’m writing code for a little Raspberry Pi HUD I’m running in my house, project ‘Homehud’. Naturally I manage the Raspbian system I’ve installed on it with Ansible.
Restricting the Ansible Version in Use
At YPlan we love Ansible. We use it for controlling our various AWS instances and other services, as well as with Vagrant for development environments that are in sync. This way if we want to upgrade a system package or piece of configuration, it needs only be written once in Ansible before being applied everywhere.
Deploying AWS Lambda Functions with Ansible
AWS Lambda is a hip “serverless” technology that everyone is talking about. While I find ‘serverless’ a bit of a funny name—it just means a managed environment—I like using Lambda functions for infrastructure glue or running small internal applications. Putting these things on individually managed servers of their own has always been a pain, so Lambda is a perfect fit.
Making Ansible a Bit Faster
I recently reduced the YPlan build time by about 30% by tuning two Ansible settings. They’re not on by default, but work in most setups, so this will make a nice short guide on going faster.
An Ansible MVP (Minimum Viable Playbook) for Testing Tasks
I showed this briefly in my post on merging groups and hostvars, but I thought it was worth writing a whole post on. The Minimum Viable Playbook (MVP) is the shortest, most useful Ansible playbook I have. Whenever I need to write some Ansible code and I’m not entirely sure I’m doing it right (which is often), I implement it first in the MVP so I can test it quickly. Here’s my latest iteration:
Cleaning Up Nameless EC2 Instances with Ansible
I gave a talk at the recent London Ansible Meetup on how I cleared up unexplained nameless/‘anonymous’ EC2 instances from our AWS account at YPlan. This is the blog post version of that talk, so you can follow along and stop such instances appearing on your account and sapping money!
Validating Ansible changes
If you’re using ansible to set a configuration file for a program, one of the most important things you can add is a validation step to ensure that you don’t hit reboot and the program refuses to launch - service down!
Merging groups and hostvars in Ansible variables
I was googling for information on creating round-robin DNS records in Route53 with Ansible and came across this post by Daniel Hall who’d figured out a way of merging the his host group list with their hostvars in Ansible. After a bit of emailing with him I’ve figured a way to do it without having to add an extra filter as he did originally - by digging more into Jinja2.