Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)
by piva00 on Thursday May 17, 2018 @05:13AM
(#17089859)
I think I achieved my perfect balance of tooling for current systems with Ansible and Docker.
Ansible automates even provisioning in AWS. I never really liked CloudFormation's way of creating stacks, so I began to use Ansible to document the application's stack, have used it to deploy systems running in EC2 with RDS, ElastiCache, SQS, SNS, DynamoDB, etc.
After provisioning/configuring I'd end up with an instance in EC2 with Docker installed and from there our CI/CD would just trigger the deployment playbook that simply would do a `docker pull` of the version tagged for release and start the container.
Ansible helped to also install our Splunk forwarders as running it from Docker was a hassle still not so long ago, so we would have the best of both worlds: configurability of the host machine completely with Ansible and packaging and predictability of deployment through Docker.
I advocate this stack as simple enough to learn and use with widely used tools without their fancy (and often broken) features. Even though they can be still a bit immature, they are production-ready enough.
Ansible automates even provisioning in AWS. I never really liked CloudFormation's way of creating stacks, so I began to use Ansible to document the application's stack, have used it to deploy systems running in EC2 with RDS, ElastiCache, SQS, SNS, DynamoDB, etc.
After provisioning/configuring I'd end up with an instance in EC2 with Docker installed and from there our CI/CD would just trigger the deployment playbook that simply would do a `docker pull` of the version tagged for release and start the container.
Ansible helped to also install our Splunk forwarders as running it from Docker was a hassle still not so long ago, so we would have the best of both worlds: configurability of the host machine completely with Ansible and packaging and predictability of deployment through Docker.
I advocate this stack as simple enough to learn and use with widely used tools without their fancy (and often broken) features. Even though they can be still a bit immature, they are production-ready enough.