Book Image

OpenStack Administration with Ansible

By : Walter Bentley
Book Image

OpenStack Administration with Ansible

By: Walter Bentley

Overview of this book

Most organizations are seeking methods to improve business agility because they have realized just having a cloud is not enough. Being able to improve application deployments, reduce infrastructure downtime, and eliminate daily manual tasks can only be accomplished through some sort of automation. Packed with real-world OpenStack administrative tasks, this book will walk you through working examples and explain how these tasks can be automated using one of the most popular open source automation tools—Ansible. We will start with a brief overview of OpenStack and Ansible and highlight some best practices. Each chapter will provide an introduction to handling various Cloud Operator administration tasks such as creating multiple users/tenants, setting up Multi-Tenant Isolation, customizing your clouds quotas, taking instance snapshots, evacuating compute hosts for maintenance, and running cloud health checks, and a step-by-step tutorial on how to automate these tasks with Ansible.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
OpenStack Administration with Ansible
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Automation considerations


At this point, we have absorbed a fair amount of framework decisions while creating our Ansible code. There is one new consideration that I want to offer up before getting started.

When stepping into the world of automating administrative tasks, you must always try to wear your system administrator hat. This means being able to think like one and attempt to predict any flexibility that you need to build into your code. Not every task will be an exact replica of the last. Adding the capability to adjust the parameters needed to execute a specific task is extremely helpful for an individual using your automation code. This can be accomplished by adding additional variables within your code and avoiding hard coding command arguments, as much as possible. Yes, there are many good use cases for hard coding items within your code. The point is to try to keep them to a minimum. You should always aim to think out of the box, as much as humanly possible.