Anyone here use ansible? And if so what for?

Anyone here use ansible? And if so what are some of this things you use it for? As far as DevOps/server management.

Managing AWS instances mostly.

I came across it in the AWS System Manager services.

What kinds of things do you use it for in AWS?

Creating/removing EC2 instances. I use it at work, we use a "gold" AWS image for our servers, and use ansible scripts to copy said gold image and configure to stand it up. This way we never have to worry about patching individual servers. We just patch the gold image, then use the scripts to delete all existing servers and recreate from the gold image (note, our servers simply host a SaaS model for our clients, so there's no data that's needed other than a few configs that the Ansible scripts pull from S3 buckets, and databases that are RDS instances).

Sounds cool!!

Did you have to create any custom ansible modules for that to work?

Is everything in ansible done in yaml or can something like python be used too?

I'm no expert but I think it does way more than that. It defines a system state and enforces it on your running servers. It can do change management, provisioning, automation and orchestration. It works with yaml files / plays / playbooks which are machine and human readable and easy to understand, no real programming skills required. I did a beginner hands on course on Pluralsight that got me pretty exited, will be diving deeper soon.

Sweet!

This one? https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/hands-on-ansible

Originally Posted by abefroman Sweet! This one? https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/hands-on-ansible

Yes that's the one!

Originally Posted by iodisciple I'm no expert but I think it does way more than that. It defines a system state and enforces it on your running servers. It can do change management, provisioning, automation and orchestration. It works with yaml files / plays / playbooks which are machine and human readable and easy to understand, no real programming skills required. I did a beginner hands on course on Pluralsight that got me pretty exited, will be diving deeper soon.

Oh yes, it CAN do WAY more than we use it for. We use only a VERY small portion of it's capabilities.

I also think that the real automation power comes with Ansible Tower, which is the commercial product and not very cheap

Red Hat just "made" an upstream to Ansible Tower and called it AWX. So you can either look through the docs/community for some binary builds of it, or compile it yourself.