Even More Infrastructure as Code… and Configuration as Code!

9/18/2018 Richard Murphy, Lindsey Blackstock

In the first two installments in this series we demonstrated creating virtual machines using Ansible playbooks, Cobbler, Gitlab, EC2, and VMware.  In this third installment Lindsey Blackstock shows us how these Ansible playbooks can be put behind an orchestration tool with a UI, like Jenkins, and perform the same tasks as we did from the command line.  In addition, Lindsey delves more into the configuration drift problem and highlights a way to deal with that using Ansible and Gitlab for a configuration-as-code implementation.  Configuration drift continues to be a problem with traditional data center environments that have not become cloud-centric.

To end the video we show how we can feed the logging data into a tool like Splunk in order to provide us with insightful dashboards that tell us what is going on with our releases.