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DebOps delivers easy Ansible automation for Debian-based systems

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Article from ADMIN 42/2017

By Martin Loschwitz

Ansible is a simple and sensible automation solution, except for the time needed to create new roles and playbooks. The DebOps collection of Ansible playbooks for Debian-based Linux systems solves this problem.

Special Thanks: This article was made possible by support from Linux Professional Institute [1].

Enterprise-grade automation solutions like Puppet and Chef are very powerful, but they require a huge amount of learning. Ansible has gained popularity as an alternative to Puppet and the other similar enterprise automation tools. The strict but simple Ansible syntax lets you define roles that are essentially self-documenting (Figure 1), which makes access far easier and ensures that you can integrate your existing knowledge faster.

Figure 1: Ansible relies on YAML and takes an approach that forces playbooks to document themselves.

Even though Ansible is simpler than Puppet or Chef, writing your own roles takes time. Wouldn't it be great if you had a library of prebuilt Ansible recipes for standard services that you could install in seconds by pressing a button?

DebOps [2] is a huge collection of prebuilt Ansible roles that you can use on fresh Debian systems.