Example Ansible scripts for building a full, multi-AZ AWS stack | Hacker News Reader

Example Ansible scripts for building a full, multi-AZ AWS stack

github.com

38 pointsRabidgremlin11 comments

This is great! I've had a hard time finding examples of pro-grade ansible playbooks that deploy entire products across multiple environments. I've had to assemble dozens of randomly obtained ideas piece by piece over the years, but it'd be fantastic if there were more full projects for reference out there. Any idea where one could find more complete examples for best practice reference?

Yeah it was really hard finding good examples to piece this together. Also I'm not sure this is a best practice example as it probably should use roles....

Roles PR'd

Awesome... I had avoided roles to keep things easier to understand but will check out the PR.

How is this better than going the Cloudformation route? (genuinely curios)

Seen Cloudformation coupled with Chef or Puppet. I don't see why Ansible would not work in the later stages of bringing up the machines, but personally think it's overkill to do everything via an Ansible playbook.

Same feedback. Cloudformation has many advantages including idempotency and ability to tear down what it created.

Also, see terraform from Hashicorp:

https://www.terraform.io/intro/vs/cloudformation.html

Still, a complete Ansible approach is illustrative so kudos on that.

(disclaimer: I wrote Ansible)

These are some pretty clean playbooks and probably the most coherent example of using the ec2 modules together I've ever seen.

Alternative approach for consideration -- currently, I am working for a company who has a very nice deployment setup that mostly just uses mostly just the Ansible ec2_tag and ec2_facts, and has an Immutable Systems (Packer) stack deployed by CloudFormation and Asgard APIs. In other words, the ansible cloud modules are not heavily utilized, but it's nice because in CF we have access to all the knobs and services. Asgard handles rolling updates across ELBs, where CF defines the infrastructure.

It's a pretty good setup! Ansible cloud modules are more or less serially executed, but don't know about each other. I do think it's important that Cloud Formation and other solutions understand the relationships between the resources.

For this reason, Terraform is super interesting conceptually, and it may be a good answer to some quirks in CF (one being it's a little hard to read/write!). Though I haven't had much direct experience to try it out, I look forward to having some time in the future.

Aside: Troposphere is an interesting project but doesn't have a lot of AWS service coverage yet - https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere

Organizations attempting "multiple-cloud providers" have more challenges than ones attempting to just pick AWS (or another), that's for sure - as they are really different in the end, and I sort of have this question in the back of my mind whether cloud abstractions are really a good idea in the end, or you really really need to know the differences between Cloud X and Y (especially to expose all the constituent services accurately).

Anyway, yeah, I think building Packer images with Ansible and deploying with something like Terraform is where I would consider starting if I had a green field infrastructure.

Don't live-manage your AWS boxen if you can help it, as you miss most of the advantages of being able to deploy AMIs. A packer.json in the example would be a good idea, and you'll get faster deploys that are a bit more predictable. Then you can use something like Vagrant to test the packer config.

I wrote a very lightweight Vagrant clone here this weekend for exactly that purpose - https://github.com/mpdehaan/strider

Well Cloudformation is AWS specific, whereas Ansible could be applied to other platforms and environments. So might be easier to learn/master just one tool?

That might be helpful for you. https://github.com/arbabnazar/ansible-aws-vpc-ha-wordpress

Wow...this is really cool. Does this work with the newer version 4 signing keys?

Mmm I'm not sure. The Ansible AWS modules use the Boto library so perhaps there is more info in its docs somewhere?

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