Ansible playbooks best practices: caveats and pitfalls

Posted on June 19, 2024August 19, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Ansible is an extremely powerful data center automation tool: most of its power comes from not being too strict into defining a structure - this enables it to be used into extremely complex scenarios as well as to very quickly set it up in quite trivial scenarios.

But this is a two edged sword: too many times I saw POC for adopting it permed POC with too poor requirements, thinking they can reuse what they experimented as a baseline for structuring Ansible: this is a very harmful error that quickly lead to unmaintainable real life environments with duplicated code and settings, often stored into structures without a consistent logic or naming, so losing the most of the benefits of such a great automation tool.

Ansible playbooks best practices: caveats and pitfalls starts from where we left with Ansible inventory best practices: caveats and pitfalls, exploring how to properly deal with writing playbooks, structuring things both to promote maintainability as well as to ease the operation and configuration tasks.

Ansible inventory best practices: caveats and pitfalls

Posted on June 18, 2024August 19, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Ansible inventory best practices: caveats and pitfalls is the post from where we begin exploring how to properly structure Ansible to get all of its power without compromises, structuring things in an easy and straightforward way suitable for almost every operating scenario.

Ansible playbooks, ansible-galaxy, roles and collections

Posted on May 16, 2024August 19, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Ansible is a powerful datacenter automation tool that enables nearly declarative automations - "Ansible playbooks, ansible-galaxy, roles and collections" is a primer with Ansible, gradually introducing concepts that we better elaborate in other posts following this one: as we already said, Ansible is a powerful tool, and as many powerful tool can make more pain than benefits if improperly managed - the aim of this post is providing a good baseline that enable quickly enable operating Ansible running ad hoc statements, playbooks and operating using Ansible Galaxy with shelf roles and collections .

This post begins where we left with the "Ansible Tutorial – Ansible Container How-To" post, writing a playbook for preparing hosts for being managed by Ansible, learning how to use Ansible Galaxy for downloading and installing shelf Ansible roles and collections. The outcome will be a running PostgreSQL instance we will use as the DB engine in the next post of the series..

Ansible Tutorial – Ansible Container Howto

Posted on May 15, 2024August 19, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Ansible is a powerful datacenter automation tool that enables nearly declarative automations - "Ansible Tutorial - Ansible Container Howto" is the first of a series of posts dedicated to Ansible, paying particularly attention at "doing all-right": Ansible is a powerful tool, and as many powerful tool can make more pain than benefits if improperly managed.

In this post we see how to quickly set up a containerised Ansible on a workstation, configuring the environment so that it can be run from the shell without explicitly invoking podman, providing a very friendly user experience the same way, enabling it to run statements as it was really installed on the system.

Wayland Tutorial – A Wayland HowTo

Posted on April 25, 2024August 19, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

The first Wayland release is dated 2012, and it was of course in a very early stage. Now 16 years have passed since the initial design, they say Wayland is mature enough that it is safe to remove X11 sessions. In the Wayland Tutorial - A Wayland HowTo post we will go through everything it is worth the effort to know about Wayland, trying to answer the question: do Wayland replace the whole X Window system, or do it replace just the X11 protocol?

X Window Tutorial – X Display Server HowTo And Cheatsheet

Posted on April 17, 2024August 19, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Even just because of its very long service lifetime, it is certainly worth the effort to have a look at this amazing piece of software. It does not matter if we are about to switch to Wayland (that by the way cannot completely replace the whole X Window System - think for example to XDMCP): the truth is that systems running X Windows will stay here for 10 years more, so 'm sure it is still worth the effort to have a good understanding of it. The "X Window Tutorial - X Display Server HowTo And Cheatsheet" post provides you with all the necessary skills to become an expert on this amazing piece of software that really made the story of UNIX and Linux.