Ansible & Vagrant infrastructure development and deployment

Introduction

Vagrant

• This is a great tool for managing local virtual machines to mimic real world infrastructure locally or in the cloud.

Ansible

• Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code.

• It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows.

• Ansible provisions servers managing their configurations & deploying applications either locally or in the cloud.It works by pushing changes to all servers(by default)

My plan is to develop this project in 2 phases.

Phase 1: Deploying Ansible & Vagrant locally.

Phase 2: Deploying Ansible & Vagrant to Google Cloud. -----> Cloud Solution

PHASE 1:

Tools used:

1. GitKraken - a Git GUI tool.

2. Debian based O.S (Parrot O.S).

3. VMWare Workstation.

4. Ubuntu Server.

Initial setup explained here:

Ubuntu server installation

I'm impressed as to the array of tools listed by the ubuntu server including the Google Cloud SDK.

Installation complete

Apparently 2 ubuntu servers can run simultaneously using the same network card but in different windowes,it was a success.

Here is a simple chart as to how everything has been set up

Create a inventory file

└──╼ $ sudo mkdir /etc/ansible

└──╼ $ sudo touch /etc/ansible/hosts

• The hosts file should contain the server(s) details,In my case:

[servers]

192.168.x.x

OR (i.e if you dont want to keep typing the SSH password)

192.168.x.x ansible_ssh_pass=xxxx ansible_ssh_user=user

Running an Ad-Hoc command

└──╼ $ansible all -m ping

See memory usage

└──╼ $ ansible servers -a "free -m" -u [ubuntu_server_1]

Other fun ansible commands

└──╼ $ansible all -m setup ---> Gathering facts.

└──╼ $ ansible abc -m copy -a "src = /etc/yum.conf dest = /tmp/yum.conf" ---> Copying a file