Ansible: heavyweight automation, lightweight learning curve

Ansible: heavyweight automation, lightweight learning curve

 

Drupal is a powerful tool that requires a solid foundation consisting of multiple dependent products to run on: web server, PHP, and database at a minimum. Working on our systems locally, we might offload this base setup and configuration to brilliant (mostly) pre-configured systems such as DrupalVM or DDev. When we move to our production environments however, there are a lot of dependencies to install and configure ourselves. Keeping an infrastructure secure, up to date, and configured using evolving best practices can be a challenge. Throw in all the extras that really make a Drupal site hum (Solr, Varnish, load-balancers, etc) and complexity rises quickly. This is where configuration management comes in.

 

Ansible - one such configuration management system - is a powerful, yet approachable modern tool that can simplify your DevOps (or general IT) life and codify your platform configuration in source. Written in YAML, playbooks can be created (and shared) for all manner of jobs, from configuring a fresh LAMP stack and installing your Drupal instance. You can also set up a complete Kubernetes system and build the containers to run on it.

 

With nothing more than the Ansible client, the SSH connection to your server(s), and some kernels of knowledge from this session, attendees can begin harnessing this power. During the session, attendees will gain a clear understanding of what Ansible is, how it works, and the variety of places it can be used to improve automation and infrastructure stability. Attendees will walk away from this session ready to dive into their first playbook in Ansible to automate whatever tedium crops up on their next day at DevOps shop.

 

Attendees should be familiar with general system maintenance.