I’m a long time fan of Juniper networking devices, there seems to be a snobbery against them for reasons I’ve never understood. Imagine my disappointment to find that this was reflected somewhat in the Ansible documentation where JUNOS seems to be the black sheep and the guides are a little patchy. Recently I’ve been having some fun integrating Ansible with JUNOS and this post is going to look at both . . .
Recently I’ve been having some fun with writing a fairly complex Terraform module which of course has to make use of Conditional Logic a fair bit. The Terraform documentation covers both Conditionals, Functions and Operators very well, but practical examples are a little lacking. In this short post I’m going to look at how Conditionals work and a few helpful examples of using a few Operators and Functions to extend . . .
At the end of last year I wrote about some basic methods for debugging networking issues inside a Kubernetes Cluster. In that article we very briefly mentioned a then-alpha feature (with a complicated sounding name) called Ephemeral Debug Containers first introduced back in Kubernetes v1.16. This looks to be the real future of debugging in Kubernetes and as of v1.20 it’s finally in beta. This great feature really strengthens a . . .
I have a t-shirt that says “There Is No Cloud, It’s Just Someone Elses’s Computer”, I also have that same quote on a sticker on the laptop I’m writing this on. It’s a good gag and it’s a view I used to subscribe to but it’s not really true. It’s fair to say that public clouds run on someone elses’s computer but that’s a big distinction. There’s a million articles . . .
Ansible Vault isn’t, if I’m honest, a solution that I’ve ever found much use for in my day to day work. I prefer to use a centralised Secrets Management solution wherever it’s practical (particularly favouring Hashicorp Vault). These systems however are time consuming to properly deploy have a steep learning curve, depending on the scale of your deployments and integration requirements Ansible Vault might serve you just fine and I . . .
Recently I’ve had the experience of reconfiguring the popular Kubernetes Service Mesh Istio (using it’s Gateway ingress model) to work with an AWS Application Load Balancer with a degree of automation and scalability. This is a challenging deployment to say the least and whilst documentation exists to varying degrees for the separate components, it’s scant. I’m less than impressed with the official Istio documentation (though it has gotten way better) . . .
Last year I wrote about automating Elastic Kubernetes Service role configuration (direct modification of the aws-auth ConfigMap) using Terraform, and a somewhat clunky method of injecting ARN data by looking it up from a secret management service (in this case Hashicorp Vault). Whilst the solution works well it comes with a serious built in issue when we want to provision a new deployment from scratch, namely the need to import . . .
Recently I’ve been presented with the same question from a couple of readers so I’m going to run through it quickly. A while back I looked at integrating Azure KeyVault with Ansible Tower (a horribly documented scenario in my experience), but I didn’t really cover how to call multiple KeyVault Secrets and assign them to a single Ansible Tower Credential for use in a Playbook. Please take a look at . . .
Ansible is a big favourite of mine as anyone that knows me will tell you and has become one of the biggest players in the DevOps world, inevitably if you’re going to use it at any real scale you’ll need to start thinking about tags. Tags are an essential part of life in the cloud, given the scale and complexity we can encounter they really become the only way to . . .
EDIT: A few days after publishing this article, Hashicorp’s official AWS provider was updated to support default tags directly from the provider (which is very simple and saves all of the work detailed in this article). This only works with AWS so if you’re working in another cloud keep reading on, if you’re only working in AWS take a look at the Hashicorp blog post here which provides some very . . .