Interesting introduction into AWX the free version of Ansible Tower.
This tutorial presents Ansible step-by-step. You'll need to have a (virtual or physical) machine to act as an Ansible node. A Vagrant environment is provided for going through this tutorial.
Ansible is a configuration management software that lets you control and configure nodes from another machine. What makes it different from other management software is that Ansible uses (potentially existing) SSH infrastructure, while others (Chef, Puppet, ...) need a specific PKI infrastructure to be set up.
Ansible also emphasizes push mode, where configuration is pushed from a master machine (a master machine is only a machine where you can SSH to nodes from) to nodes, while most other CM typically do it the other way around (nodes pull their config at times from a master machine).
This mode is really interesting since you do not need to have a 'publicly' accessible 'master' to be able to configure remote nodes: it's the nodes that need to be accessible (we'll see later that 'hidden' nodes can pull their configuration too!), and most of the time they are.
This tutorial has been tested with Ansible 2.7.1.
- This module allows one to (re)generate OpenSSL private keys.
- One can generate RSA, DSA, ECC or EdDSA private keys.
- Keys are generated in PEM format.
It is a well-known fact that real programmers do not document their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand and use. But this attitude might prove itself to be a bit problematic if we would like to get paid for our work. And because we do not want to see you all broke, we will show you how to document your Ansible collections using Sphinx.
Prerequisites
If you would like to follow along and test the commands from this post on your computer, you will need to create a new virtual environment and clone the Sensu Go Ansible collection like this: