Shared via feedly // published on Latest blog entries // visit site
Building CloudStack RPMs with Ansible
I've been hearing a lot about Ansible lately. First I've seen folks like Paul Angus building tooling around installing CloudStack with Ansible. Ansible intrigues me a bit; first it's largely being shepherded by Michael DeHaan, who originally wrote Cobbler and really eased a lot of pain for sysadmins needing to provision machines; so his work has some immediate credibility because of how awesome Cobbler was to use. Second, the entire decentralized config management angle is interesting. I like how minimalistic it is; and while I don't think that's necessarily a good fit for every environment, it is compelling for some. Finally, I see the blurring of lines between config management and workflow/job automation and that makes Ansible pretty versatile in my mind. I tend to learn best when I have a concrete project to actually apply new tools to, so when the hosted puppet master service I had been using went permanently offline, I decided to recreate some of the tooling around building CloudStack RPMs in Ansible. I started out with a very basic playbook, which worked reasonable well.
Playbooks, in Ansible parlance, are a place to both define system configuration, as well allowing a known order for workflow automation. I first started with just defining a build environment for building CloudStack RPMs.
Then I had the chance to listen to Michael DeHaan showing off Ansible at a DevOps DC meetup in November, and one of his code snippets had an unknown-to-me built in variable that cut my playbook length in half (as well as the number of ssh calls as a result.) Specifically I went from a playbook like:
to:
This made things much more efficient, and I pushed further from merely configuring the environment to also using Ansible as a bit of a workflow automation tool. So I added the entire build portion as well.
Things weren't 100% happy though - a number of the Maven dependency downloads failed, which caused compilation to fail. I really need to setup a Nexus mirror for CloudStack dependencies both to speed things up as well as to ensure they are reliably available for building. But this failure isn't the fault of Ansible, so can't really fault it here.
The end result is being able to spin up a fresh machine, point Ansible to it, applying the playbook and coming back (admittedly building the RPMs takes a long time) after a long cup of coffee and finding RPMs done. You can see my admittedly beginning attempts at this playbook here:
https://github.com/ke4qqq/ansible_cloudstack_rpmbuild
If you need to build CloudStack RPMs, or want to see a very basic Ansible playbook you can look at:
https://github.com/ke4qqq/ansible_cloudstack_rpmbuild
Playbooks, in Ansible parlance, are a place to both define system configuration, as well allowing a known order for workflow automation. I first started with just defining a build environment for building CloudStack RPMs.
Then I had the chance to listen to Michael DeHaan showing off Ansible at a DevOps DC meetup in November, and one of his code snippets had an unknown-to-me built in variable that cut my playbook length in half (as well as the number of ssh calls as a result.) Specifically I went from a playbook like:
- name: Install wget yum: pkg=wget state=latest - name: Install rpm-build yum: pkg=rpm-build state=latest
to:
- name: Install deps and niceties yum: pkg={{ list }} state=latest with_items: - wget - rpm-build ... This made things much more efficient, and I pushed further from merely configuring the environment to also using Ansible as a bit of a workflow automation tool. So I added the entire build portion as well.
Things weren't 100% happy though - a number of the Maven dependency downloads failed, which caused compilation to fail. I really need to setup a Nexus mirror for CloudStack dependencies both to speed things up as well as to ensure they are reliably available for building. But this failure isn't the fault of Ansible, so can't really fault it here.
The end result is being able to spin up a fresh machine, point Ansible to it, applying the playbook and coming back (admittedly building the RPMs takes a long time) after a long cup of coffee and finding RPMs done. You can see my admittedly beginning attempts at this playbook here:
https://github.com/ke4qqq/ansible_cloudstack_rpmbuild
If you need to build CloudStack RPMs, or want to see a very basic Ansible playbook you can look at:
https://github.com/ke4qqq/ansible_cloudstack_rpmbuild
No comments:
Post a Comment