Automated Deployment Pipeline 3 of 3

Background We have previously covered a pipeline example with Jenkins calling Ansible to leverage OpenSSH configuration and Ansible inventory. We also discussed a use case with declarative pipeline. In this posting, I will provide another advanced example, built on declarative pipeline. The pipeline file will be pulled from Git repository. Also, the script is executed … Read moreAutomated Deployment Pipeline 3 of 3

Automated Deployment Pipeline 2 of 3

In this posting, we continue to discuss Jenkins’ ability to automate deployment routines. Jenkins supports freestyle project out of the box, as well as Pipeline with several plugins. Freestyle project allows user to specify multiple steps on UI. This does not scale well when your entire process involves many steps. As explained on Jenkins’ website: … Read moreAutomated Deployment Pipeline 2 of 3

Automated Deployment Pipeline 1 of 3

The business case You launched a software application. You installed it on two customer sites. You support the application mostly by SSH to customer server and run Bash commands, or slightly better, Bash scripts. The product is a hit to the market. You hired 20 support specialists in a customer service department. The dream client … Read moreAutomated Deployment Pipeline 1 of 3

Ansible at scale 2 of 2

Template (with Jinja2) and files In an Ansible role, we can use files or templates to achieve similar results for configuration files. If the configuration file is the same across all targets then we can place it in files directory to push out. If the content of configuration file varies depending on the cluster size, … Read moreAnsible at scale 2 of 2

Ansible at scale 1 of 2

The Ansible In Depth white paper outlines Ansible’s use cases in four categories: Configuration management Application deployment Orchestration: for coordinating a multi-machine process such as interacting with load balancer and rolling cluster upgrade As-needed task execution: ad-hoc tasks on large number of hosts At work, my original automation scheme involves several Ansible Playbooks that started … Read moreAnsible at scale 1 of 2

Pitfalls in deployment automation

There is no doubt that organizations with lots of manual tasks should automate at least some of the IT tasks. As the automation tools such as Ansible, Puppet become mature, the skillset becomes prevalent as well. If automation is not carried out properly, they can cost the organization an arm and a leg. The ultimate … Read morePitfalls in deployment automation