Ansible 👨‍💻

Exciting News! I’m thrilled to announce that the 2nd edition of my book, “Learn Ansible: Automate your cloud infrastructure, security configuration, and application deployment using Ansible” is now available for pre-order on Amazon and Packt Publishing’s website! 📣 🎉 📚 Amazon ( 🇺🇸 ) Amazon ( 🇬🇧 ) Packt Publishing ( 🌍 ) Whether you’re a beginner or an intermediate user looking to take your Ansible skills to the next level, this hands-on guide will empower you to automate your infrastructure and application deployments consistently and efficiently....

As mentioned in a previous post, I recently finished writing the second edition of Learn Ansible. This had me using Python a lot, and my one key takeaway is that managing Python has become a massive chore. Now, with the book complete, I thought I would strip back on my machine, start from scratch - or as close to clean as I could get - and develop a cleaner, more streamlined way of managing Python on my local machine....

I am pleased to announce that my latest book, “Infrastructure as Code for Beginners,” is now available for purchase. Over the last six months, I have fully dedicated myself to this project, channeling my experience and knowledge into providing a resource that simplifies the complexities of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The importance of IaC cannot be overstated in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape. IaC ensures consistent and repeatable deployment of cloud-based services, thereby saving time while delivering robust results....

Following on from upgrading my Macs to all M1-based ones, I get around to finally needing to use Ansible; typically, I would install Python using PyEnv and then run the following … It should just work?!?! pip install --user ansible pip install --user -r https://github.com/ansible-collections/azure/blob/dev/requirements-azure.txt ansible-galaxy collection install azure.azcollection … and away we go, but this time I came across a few problems. The first was the following error when installing the requirements using the remote requirements-azure....

One of the annoying things about updating to the latest version of macOS is that a lot of the command-line tools I use tend to break or need tweaking slightly from how I have been using them. One of the annoyances in the move to Big Sur is that Python is a back to being a massive pain, and more so than normal. At the time of writing pyenv external link is not running all that well, and while there are fixes available they slow down my shell — for more information on the problem see this GitHub issue external link and for information on why pyenv see my previous post on updating Python on macOS external link ....

I thought it was was about time that I started to have a play with Azure DevOps a little more than I have been doing, one of the things I have always meant to look at in the past is using DevOps to run Ansible playbooks. However the Ansible Task external link recommended by Microsoft has always put me off, the reason for this is that this task requires a Virtual Machine to run Ansible — this to me always seemed a little overkill....

Over the last few months I have been doing more and more work with Ansible to manage end to end deployments in Azure. For the most part Ansible’s core set of Azure modules work with no problems and more than do the job. However, with the rate which Microsoft are both adding new features and functionality it is difficult to keep up. The core Ansible modules rely on several Azure python libraries to be updated before the functionality can be added or introduced to the core module set....

It has been a while as I have been busy writing, I thought I would spend some of my freetime having a very quick play with Ansible AWX external link , which is the Open Source version of Ansible Tower external link . I created the following Vagrantfile to launch a CentOS 7 external link server; # -*- mode: ruby -*- # vi: set ft=ruby : VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2" Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config| config....