New Appliance: Ansible Orchestration Engine

[Dude4Linux]

Ansible is a radically simple configuration-management, application deployment, task-execution, and multinode orchestration engine.

Read the documentation and more at http://ansible.com/
The TurnKey Ansible appliance is in development and available for test at https://github.com/Dude4Linux/ansible

[lirazsiri]

Wow John this is great! I haven't tried Ansible yet myself but I keep hearing good things about it. Glad to have the opportunity to explore it in greater depth now that we're going to have this in the library.

[Dude4Linux]

Liraz,

There is still some work to be done before I would consider it ready for
release. One is the need to write a module in Python for TurnKey so
that it can recognize a TurnKey appliance and deciding which commands
need to be added. I'm still trying to find the time to learn Python and
Yaml. Thought I would post the announcement in case there are others
who want to kick the tires.

John

[lirazsiri]

John, do you think this is a must have feature or a nice to have feature? If we don't have this do you think it would still make sense to include Ansible in the library?

[lirazsiri]

I've tagged this #new-appliance

[Dude4Linux]

Liraz, Just a quick progress report. I'm working on the beta3 release which I think can be considered a release candidate. I haven't been able to develop all the features I hoped for, but it will give me something to work on for the next release cycle. Hopefully will be able to get this pushed out tomorrow.

[lirazsiri]

Sounds like good progress John. Don't let a few missing features
discourage you. An integration doesn't have to be perfect to be useful,
it just has to be better than the alternatives.

On 24/07/14 06:58, Dude4Linux wrote:

Liraz, Just a quick progress report. I'm working on the beta3 release which I think can be considered a release candidate. I haven't been able to develop all the features I hoped for, but it will give me something to work on for the next release cycle. Hopefully will be able to get this pushed out tomorrow.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#241 (comment)

[Dude4Linux]

Liraz, I just pushed the first release candidate. Needs some minor cleanup of the .rst files. I'm still struggling with simple things like creating a code block and relative reference to another document.

[Dude4Linux]

Liraz, I made the corrections to the .rst files. The content could still use some polishing but this will do for now. I noticed something that I hadn't thought of before. The logo png that I included was taken from the old AnsibleWorks logo. The company has now gained the ansible.com domain and rebranded the company as Ansible. There is now a new logo and restrictions on how it can be used. See http://www.ansible.com/logos for details.

TODO: Things that may be considered for future development

• Script to gather facts from TurnKey appliances. This would include things like app name, version, base distribution, etc.
• Module to implement TurnKey specific actions, e.g. apply security updates, run TKLbam, etc. Ansible can already perform package installation, restart services, etc. so there is no need to duplicate actions that already exist.

I've been looking for examples that could be helpful in figuring out how to write the module.
https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples has some older examples from AnsibleWorks.
https://galaxy.ansible.com/ Ansible Galaxy is their new community sharing site.

[lirazsiri]

I was thinking of how to explain restructured text code blocks but
looking at the documentation you created for Ansible it doesn't look
like you need help with that.

I was going to write that if want the usage documentation to span
multiple pages, the relative links in the TKLDev rst files might serve
as examples, but then I see that today you already figured that out.

In any case I'm looking at the commits and it looks like you put quite a
bit of effort into this over the past week. Kudos John! Especially for
going the extra mile and putting together some usage info. This will be
one of the most detailed integrations TurnKey.

On 26/07/14 07:13, Dude4Linux wrote:

Liraz, I just pushed the first release candidate. Needs some minor cleanup of the .rst files. I'm still struggling with simple things like creating a code block and relative reference to another document.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#241 (comment)

[lirazsiri]

I'm going over Core seeing what resources we could leverage for the
Ansible scripts.

/etc/os-release lists the underlying Debian version. Ansible might
already support this. FWIW, this file is standard now on most
distributions I've come across, not just on Debian::

$ cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 7 (wheezy)"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="7"
VERSION="7 (wheezy)"
ID=debian
ANSI_COLOR="1;31"
HOME_URL="http://www.debian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="http://www.debian.org/support/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="http://bugs.debian.org/"

The turnkey-version commands returns the string we should to identify
what TKLBAM profile should be used::

root@core /etc# turnkey-version
turnkey-core-13.0-wheezy-amd64

install-security-updates has been renamed in inithooks to
turnkey-install security-updates, so we should watch out for that. Or
just try to execute both.

The turnkey-sysinfo commands prints the useful system info you see when
you login (e.g., load, memory usage, storage on root).

[JedMeister]

Where is this one up to @Dude4Linux ? Have you had a chance to test building it with the v14.0RC1 TKLDev yet?

Also any further thoughts on making the other TurnKey appliances play nice with it?