Getting Started

ansible-provision is part of suite of ansible roles that provide a common interface for provisioning infrastructure. While there is a slant towards AWS services many interfaces support vmware vCenter and Azure.

Design Principles

  • Convention over configuration - Require as minimal configuration as possible, lookup ids in the background and use conventions whenever possible
  • Prefer declarative template (e.g. AWS Cloudformation / Azure Resource Templates) to direct API calls
  • Use cloud-init extensively to setup volumes and bootstrap instances for deployment.

Dependencies

  • ansible

  • ansible-deploy is used to generate cloudinit config files for bootrapping instances once they have been provisioned.

    ansible-deploy shares many of the same interfaces as ansible-provision so that for example an EBS volume can be provisioned and then formatted and mounted it into the filesystem on startup.

  • systools provides many helpers and bootstraping tools (systools will be installed by ansible-deploy if it is missing)

  • fireviz is a tool to convert Graphviz firewall diagrams into Cloudformation/ARM templates
  • (Optional) ansible-dependencies provides RPM, DEB and pip packages that simplify the installation of ansible with all the required dependencies to use cloud and networking modules
  • (Optional) ansible-run provides CLI tools for easily running and testing ansible playbooks using ansible-dependencies.

Quickstart with Virtual Box

  • Install Virtual Box and create a VM named "Ubuntu_Template"

  • Create an inventory file under inventory/group_vars/all.yml

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target: virtualbox
template: Ubuntu_Template

  • Install the CLI: pip install ansible-provision

  • Provision an instance: ansible-provision --hostname test_instance

Targets

Target Description
aws Generates and then executes CloudFormation templates for each ansible group
aws-service-catalog Similar to aws but instead of creating an instance it creates a service catalog product
azure Generates Azure Resource Templates and then executes them
vmware Creates VM's using the native ansible VMware modules and vCenter / vSphere
vmware-fusion Clones VM's using the vmrun CLI included with VMware Fusion
VirtualBox Clones VM's using the VBoxManage CLI included with VirtualBox

Pinning Versions

Both ansible-provision and ansible-deploy can be pinned to specific versions at an inventory level, rather than at an installation level. This works by checking out specific tags or branches just before running the role:

inventory/group_vars/all.yml

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ansible_deploy_version: 2.9.2
ansible_provision_version: 4.1

Sample Folder Structure

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├── cloudformation           # applies to AWS only
│   └── iam.cf
├── firewall
│   ├── all.gv
│   └── mapping.yml
├── inventory
│   ├── group_vars
│   │   ├── all
│   │   ├── app
│   │   ├── db
│   │   ├── dev
│   │   ├── test
│   │   └── web
│   └── hosts
├── play.yml
└── roles
    └── requirements.yml