Infracoders Graz Meetup: Keep InfraCode Simple with Ansible

The second Infracoders Meetup was also held in the Aula X Space, in Eggenberg, and took place on the 11th of April, 2017. About 18 attendees learned a lot about Ansible and received a lot of tips and tricks for their daily work.

Welcome

Edmund Haselwanter, the CEO at Infralovers, welcomed together with Theresa Wallas, the Infracoders. They informed them that the Infracoders belong to a worldwide network and deal with topics like infrastructure automation. About every 6-8 weeks Meetups will take place to exchange about technologies like Chef, Puppet, Docker, Ansible, etc.

Talk: "Keep InfraCode Simple with Ansible - Introduction and Best Practices"

Josè Molero works as a big data system engineer at the Know-Center in Graz and has years of experience with cloud- and high performance computing and managing clusters based on Linux. As an introduction he defined Ansible and talked about the advantages and disadvantages of it. He also tries to differentiate Ansible from other configuration management systems like Chef, Puppet and explains the differences as well as pull- and push-working methods. Afterwards he gives a deep inside into the topic and introduces the main features of Ansible:

• Modules
• Playbooks
• Roles

At the end he makes a live demonstration and shows how to write infrastructure in code with Ansible and how to start an automated workflow with this. In detail he installed an ELK Stack (ElasticSearch, Logtash and Kibana) on two different instances.

Discussion and Networking

After an extensive Q&A session all Infracoders enjoyed the evening with drinks and snacks sponsered by Infralovers. They talked about their experiences with Ansible, SaltStack and Chef and collected ideas for the topic at the next Infracoders Meetup on the 4th of July.