Hi Mark! Glad to hear things are working out well and thanks for sharing!
--Michael On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 5:02 PM, Mark McCoy <[email protected]> wrote: > Just wanted to say thanks to all of the Ansible developers and the > community of users, and to share my success story with Ansible. > > I stumbled upon Ansible a couple of months ago, and it was the perfect > solution for a particular problem space that we had. In the past, I've > tried the various open source CM tools and never found the one that matched > my style of working. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, but > Ansible seems to work the way that I want it to pretty much right out of > the box. > > Over the last couple of months, I needed to expand from a single pair of > Solaris systems running a clustered application, to having 6 different > clustered instances of that same application on RHEL instead of Solaris, > each with its own slightly different configuration (from a single PROD > instance with a cloned TEST, to 3 different environments each with their > own PROD and TEST clustered pairs). Also, the new instances of the > application didn't necessarily have the same requirements, since one > environment only needs to be active/passive, another needed to be > active/active with an additional Terracotta shared memory cluster, another > needed to be active/active without Terracotta, etc.... > > In the past, I simply had scripts to manage the app on each Solaris > server, with the conf directory of the application in a subversion > repository and a clone of one of the Solaris zones as a test system. I > would test out a configuration change on the clone, and if it worked I > would check it into svn and check it out on the 2 production nodes. > > When this new project came to pass, I started down the route of standing > up the new systems using my old method, but that was obviously not going to > work. I looked at puppet and chef (briefly, since I knew they really > wouldn't have suited the situation), and decided to test out Ansible. I had > the first TEST instance running on a pair of RHEL VMs within a day or two, > and a more fully fleshed out setup for the first TEST/PROD environment > within a week. > > Ansible also forced me to do a particular task in the "right" way by > packaging up the common parts of the application into a RPM package and > setting it to install with the yum module, instead of trying to keep the > files for each version in sync on every play. I even have group_vars for > each environment so that I can control which version of the RPM is > installed, so I can test upgrading to new versions and roll back to the old > versions if needed just by changing a variable. > > We put the first of the new environments into PRODUCTION status this week > and it was a great success. It is also very easy to migrate configurations > from TEST to PROD for each environment. The next step is to migrate the > current PROD environment over to RHEL, and I am confident that this process > will go much more smoothly, since I have the first "Ansible managed" > environment as a guide. > > The "no client" approach of Ansible worked best for me, since we are all > adept at using scripts over SSH to manage our systems. I feel confident > that I could hand over this project to another analyst today and they would > hit the ground running and stand up the other 2 environments with minimal > problems. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Ansible Project" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ansible-project/b4337eae-90aa-4c78-8a34-1c9a4e978058%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ansible-project/b4337eae-90aa-4c78-8a34-1c9a4e978058%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ansible Project" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ansible-project/CA%2BnsWgwL%2BXg%2BOheBZ_Y1xeebkZ4OFC5dsPMqq0sfFNYsKFt20w%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
