Photo by Pawel Nolbert on Unsplash
Multicloud management with Ansible
Independence
Many cloud providers vie for the user's favor. Besides the top dogs, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), smaller regional or specialized providers are increasingly offering cloud computing resources, which is good for the user because competition is known to stimulate business and prompt price drops. Precisely because companies have a choice when it comes to cloud services, they will not want to bind themselves to a single vendor.
However, very few professional cloud users click through the providers' pretty web GUIs to roll out dynamic resources. The whole thing has to work quickly and automatically. All cloud providers, therefore, offer powerful tools for the command line, which can also be used to generate scripts that automate the rollout.
Of course, this is exactly what could shoot down your desired independence from the provider. After all, anyone who has invested a large amount of time developing fancy scripts for AWS cannot easily switch to GCP or Azure without first switching their automation to a different toolset. Two things can help in such a case: Ansible as an independent automation tool and a modular abstraction strategy.
Independence
Nobody rolls out empty virtual machines (VMs) for their own sake on platforms such as AWS or GCP: The decision is determined by the application. Providers are offering more and more convenient and preconfigured services for this purpose. Want MariaDB? No problem: Here's a pre-built image to roll out directly to AWS. The user saves themselves the trouble of separate operating system (OS) and database installations. This scenario sounds tempting, especially for the cloud provider, because it ties the user firmly to the platform and precisely to this one template, which is not available for another platform in this form.
To remain independent, administrators need to separate the VM rollout from the
...
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy ADMIN Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Related content
-
Explore automation-as-code with Ansible
The Ansible automation tool makes it really easy to implement IT scenarios as code. We use structured YAML code to roll out Ansible in the form of AWX. -
Jira, Confluence, and GitLab
Jira, Confluence, and GitLab are very popular DevOps tools and often form the basis for agile work flows. With the right Ansible playbooks, Ubuntu can be turned into an agile work center. -
Keeping it simple – the Ansible automator
The powerful Ansible automator comes without airs and graces, does without complex syntax, self-documents, and has no need to hide its light compared with Puppet and other configuration management tools. -
Automating system configuration with Ansible AWX
Ansible is a powerful tool for automating the configuration of computers across the network. Red Hat developed Ansible Tower as a handy interface for managing Ansible. AWX is the freely available, community version of Tower. -
The 10 best tricks for taming Ansible
Ansible is considered by far the most practical automation tool, but in many places, quirks make life with the tool unnecessarily complicated. We reveal the 10 best tricks for Ansible on Linux.