Configuration Management

Configuration management involves modifying servers from an existing state to a desired state. Numerous tools exist to modify the state in a controlled way, including Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, and Ansible. Puppet and Chef are written in Ruby, while SaltStack and Ansible are written in Python.

Ad hoc tasks

Configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and SaltStack are not useful for performing ad hoc tasks that require interactive responses. Fabric and Invoke are used for interactive operations, such as querying the database from the Django manage.py shell.

Ansible

Ansible is an open source configuration management and application deployment tool built in Python.

Ansible Resources

• Official Ansible documentation

• Python for Configuration Management with Ansible slides from PyCon UK 2013

• Ansible Weekly Newsletter

• First Steps with Ansible

• Red Badger on Ansible

• Getting Started with Ansible

• Ansible and Linode

• Multi-factor SSH authentication with Ansible and Duo Security

• Ansible vs. Shell Scripts

• Ansible and Salt: A Detailed Comparison

• Automating your development environment with Ansible

• Post-install steps with Ansible

• First Five (and a half) Minutes on a Server with Ansible

• (Detailed) Introduction to Ansible

• Create a Couchbase Cluster with Ansible

• Idempotence, convergence, and other silly fancy words we often use

• How to Write an Ansible Role for Ansible Galaxy

• Testing with Jenkins, Docker and Ansible

What's next after automating your app configuration?