Automation use-cases in the Cloud Johan Wennerberg, a Solution Architect for Red Hat Nordics in Stockholm gave presentation in Red Hat Open Tour 2022 Tallinn. In his presentation titled "Gain robust repeatability as selfservice, by automating your automation" he listed several automation use-cases in the Cloud. Each of these automation use-cases is made possible by […]
Overview of Ansible quality assurance Ansible is an IT automation engine which you can use for configuration management, orchestration and device management, among other things. While you can get started fast with Ansible, ensuring high-quality, bug-free code can be challenging. Moreover, there's not that much official, high-quality or coherent documentation available on Ansible quality assurance […]
Microsoft Azure provides a metrics and monitoring framework called Azure Monitor. With it you can monitor your Cloud infrastructure and services running there. You can view graphs of the metrics, alert on threshold and all that usual stuff, just like in AWS Cloudwatch. Some Cloud resources like Azure Functions expose "a limited number of useful […]
While rspec-puppet documentation is quite decent, it does not really explain how to test classes that get their parameters via Hiera lookups, such as profiles in the roles and profiles pattern. Several parameters related to Hiera are listed in the rspec-puppet configuration reference, but that's all. The other documentation you find on the Internet is […]
I wrote this article to better understand all the pieces called "AD" or "Active Directory" in Microsoft Azure fit together. The pieces are as follows: Active Directory (AD): The is the classic on-premise Active Directory with LDAP, Kerberos, group policies and all that. Traditionally Windows machines in larger environments have been domain-joined to on-premise AD. […]
The traditional way of managing systems with Puppet is to install Puppet agent on the nodes being managed and point those agents to a Puppet server (more details here). This approach works well for environments with tens or hundreds of nodes, but is an overkill for small environments with just a handful of nodes. Fortunately […]
This article is a short introduction to Packer and Vagrant - tools that we often recommend to our customers but which may be a bit hard to understand if you have no previous expose to them. Packer Packer is used to “create identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration”. Packer works […]
OpenVPN is among the best VPN solutions, especially when you need a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS) solution that just works. It is best suited for point to site (P2S) or "road warrior" setups where users access internal resources using a VPN client when on the road. When setting up OpenVPN server in Azure […]
This was a revelation that came to me when fixing Vagrant on my Fedora 34 laptop: Vagrant plugins seem to be just Ruby gems installed into an isolated runtime environment, with "vagrant plugin" ensuring that the gems are installed in the correct place. The same gems that you can install with "vagrant plugiin install" can […]
GitLab has an extensive API which allows managing its internal configuration such as users, groups and projects. The official GitLab Terraform provider builds on top of this API. It assumed here that the Terraform controller (e.g. your laptop) is able to reach your GitLab instance's TCP port 443 - if it can't there's no way […]
When working with Puppet and Puppet modules in particular you quickly notice that there are several ways to manage module dependencies. Today I learned about a new way introduced in Puppet Bolt 3.x, so I thought I'd compile a list that celebrates this diversity: metadata.json: used primarily to dependency metadata to Puppet Forge. Some tools […]
Puppet Litmus is a Puppet acceptance test harness that leverages on many existing, proven technologies. In the long run Litmus aims to replace Beaker. However, the latter is currently still the only way to run multi-machine (e.g. cluster) acceptance tests in a standardized way. For example we use Beaker for our Keycloak domain mode cluster […]
When using ejabberd in a company for multi-user chat (see my earlier blog post) people will quickly start complaining that they missed discussions because they had been offline. Ejabberd does play back last 20 messages when user joins a room, but that is too little for an active chatroom. The simplistic approach is to set […]
Ejabberd is a very flexible and scalable XMPP server. We use it because it can be configured using a simple yaml configuration file and managed via ejabberdctl commands. This makes it a good fit for our infrastructure as code approach. That said, ejabberd does require one to understand the XMPP protocol/jargon as it does not […]
Writing static facts is fairly easy even with a low level of Ruby skills. Below is an example of a fact that returns true or false depending on whether the node has a /boot partition: As you can see above the required information was already inside the "mountpoints" fact of Facter. Using the fact is […]
Here's the next episode in our Duplo visualization series, have a look! This time we put Puppet agents to work. Featuring: Puppet agents will retrieve their desired state definition (catalog) from Puppet master for the Puppet environment they're in. Puppet agent reads the catalog: Puppet agent compares the current state to the catalog and notices […]
Separating data from code in Puppet modules is advisable as it improves reusability of code. The separation can be accomplished with Hiera by having separate levels based on facts, organizational units, locations, etc. Hiera can also be used for storing private data that needs to be protected and must not be readable by outsiders. Typically […]
If the workflow that includes the control repository, r10k and GitLab still feels too light, there are yet more ways to make the workflow heavier by adding more abstraction to the Puppet modules themselves. This is done by adopting the "Roles and Profiles pattern" that was developed by Craig Dunn and popularized in the blog […]
We've been having DIY visualization sessions on Puppet and sysadmin related topics and we wanted to share some of them with you. We had a lot of fun doing this, hope you'll enjoy this even a bit as much as we did! Let me introduce the characters involved in the first chapter: R10k is started […]
In the previous posts of this series I discussed the control repository and r10k. The last component in fattening the workflow is Git provider such as GitLab, GitHub or Bitbucket. Nowadays all of them are reasonable choices for storing private Git modules, which Puppet control repositories and site-specific modules tend to be. One of the […]
