[SGVLUG] Reminder: May meeting: Ansible talk @ OpenX on May 14th *NOTE* Earlier start time: 6pm

[James McDuffie]

A reminder that our May meeting will be OpenX (Lake and Walnut) this
month and start an hour earlier at 6pm.  (Sorry Ubuntu Hour folks!).  We
are probably going to be at OpenX again in June, and then, we'll
probably go back to Du-Pars.

Due to the building security at OpenX, we need to get them a list of
names 48 hours in advance.  This can be first name and last initial. 
Bobby M., who is the OpenX employee arranging this for us, will be
checking in people.

Please, please RSVP via Meetup by 5pm on Tuesday, May 12th.  If you
don't like Meetup, RSVP to Lan (l.dang at ymail.com).
We have 41 people currently RSVPed.  The cap on Meetup is 70.  The real
maximum is 80 people.  (We checked with facilities.)

http://www.meetup.com/SGVTech/events/221742845/


TOPIC

Andrew Hamilton will go over the basics of Ansible and discuss why it's
a great tool for running simple commands, complex tasks and workflows
across a group of systems.

Ansible is a powerful but simple automation tool. Ansible is simple
enough that most developers and administrators will be able to
understand the scripts without much trouble. With this simplicity,
Ansible is great for organizations looking for a tool that both dev and
ops can use together. The YAML based syntax of Ansible is also much
easier to understand than the DSL that some other tools use.

BIO

Andrew is currently a Systems Architect at Prevoty where he focuses on
automation and infrastructure. Previously he was an SRE for Search
@Twitter and a system administrator for Eucalyptus. Andrew is passionate
about cloud computing and automation. 

DIRECTIONS

OpenX is located in the One West Bank building @ 888 E Walnut St. 
Pasadena CA, 91101. Entrances to the building are eastbound on Walnut,
right hand side before the Lake St. intersection or southbound on Lake
St. right hand side after the Walnut St. intersection. Once through the
driveway, please park in the 888 Lot that has the OpenX logo displayed
out front. Pull a ticket and bring it with you to the Meet-Up, we will
validate your parking.



MORE ON ANSIBLE:

Ansible has many features common to configuration management systems
such as Puppet and Chef. Ansible uses a simple execution model compared
to Puppet and Chef that is much easier for new users to understand. The
majority of the modules it provides are indepotent so a playbook can be
run multiple times without causing problems by running a change multiple
times if it isn't needed. The use of YAML to describe your playbooks
also makes creating and editing Ansible playbooks much easier.


Interacting directly with services such as AWS, GCE, Azure or OpenStack
is easy through a set of provided modules. Ansible allows you to create
an entire deployment framework with one tool that can provision hosts,
configure and install software, add and remove servers from a load
balancer and finally terminate the old instances. Ansible can also use
dynamically generated lists of hosts making it easy to work in highly
dynamic environments.

One of the most powerful features of Ansible is that hosts are accessed
over SSH. There is no need to install additional daemons or to open up
additional ports. You can simply write a playbook, give it a set of
hosts to run against, provide a set of credentials and watch Ansible do
what you've told it to do.


You also don't need to give Ansible access to root unless it is required
for the playbook. Ansible can use either sudo or su to escalate
privileges for single tasks or entire playbooks.


Ansible core is written in Python so it's easy to run and extend. If
Python is your language of choice, Ansible provides you with a set of
modules that make writing your own modules easy. If you're not a Python
developer, Ansible allows modules to be written in any language that can
accept JSON through STDIN and then return JSON back to through STDOUT.
Ansible can also be used as a library in Python that allows you to
easily take advantage of some of its features in custom scripts. Ansible
is a flexible tool that allows users to easily perform both adhoc remote
command execution and configuration management across a group of hosts.
Getting started with Ansible is easy and has relatively low overhead.
Ansible playbooks are simple enough that they can be compared with shell
scripts. We'll go over the basics of Ansible and discuss why it's a
great tool for running simple commands, complex tasks and workflows
across a group of systems.