re: #207 Dopamine Fish

Do you have a minute to talk about our lord and savior, Ansible?

No, but seriously. Have you ever given thought to writing automation to configure a new server? It’s ridiculously easy these days. We use it extensively. We can provision an entire clone of our production environment in minutes, if need be, simply by executing some Ansible playbooks to create a new set of Docker swarm hosts with the exact configuration we need to be able to redeploy any application in our topology.

I used Ansible to provision a lot of servers in a cloud environment. Changes had to be done in the maintenance window between midnight and 6 a.m. by the production teams.

We were able to create playbooks that would run quickly and without user input errors for tasks that previously required 30 page plus instruction documents.

I’m a fan. But maybe most appropriate when doing multiple servers.