Without a doubt the topic that seems to confuse people the most when using Ansible Tower is working with Credentials. Especially how to pass multiple credentials from either an external Secret Management source (which we’ve looked at a few times here) or just defining some arbitrary set of credentials and using them in a template. I get emails about this topic from readers on a fairly regular basis and professionally . . .
In a previous article we took a look at the very unwieldy integration of the Istio IngressGateway with an AWS Application Load Balancer, however we didn’t look at any Health Check options to monitor the the ALB via it’s Target Group. A dig around the usual forums suggests that this is confusing a lot of people and it threw me the first time I looked. In post we’ll have a . . .
A question that I’ve been approached about several times recently is how to lookup multiple Hashicorp Vault Secrets and assign them to a single Ansible Tower Credential for use in a Playbook. A while ago I looked at the process of integrating Hashicorp Vault with Ansible Tower (a less that perfect process in the first place) but this has repeatedly led to the same question about multiple Secrets, so in . . .
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 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) . . .
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 . . .
Recently I’ve been working with Ansible in GCP to try and automate the process of provisioning a bare metal Kubernetes cluster. A good find in this process was the Ansible gcp_compute plugin which allows for the construction of Dynamic Inventories based on your existing GCE resources. What Are We Working With? As is often the case with Ansible, the documentation is great but can be confusing without context or to . . .
Recently I’ve spent a good amount of time looking at options for managing Kubernetes Secrets with Vault. Hashicorp being a great supporter of the Cloud Native philosophy, it’s little surprise to find that they provide a multitude of options to integrate with Kubernetes and provide extensive documentation here. for my needs I found that the suggested configurations were either unsuitable or required a degree of over-engineering so I’m going to . . .
Vault offers an array of flexible storage backends with a view to providing a highly available storage location to store secrets, this is a great baked-in design choice as if you make Vault an integral part of your infrastructure you can ill afford a sudden outage, a perfect platform for storing structured data is, of course, a RDBMS (Relational Database Management System), as many of the mainstays are scalable and . . .
In a previous post we’ve looked at how to build Azure infrastructure with Terraform, handle sensitive secrets by storing them within Vault and centrally manage states within Azure Object Storage (confusingly called Containers). In this post we’ll take a look at the same solution but leverage the same technology within AWS, making use of AWS S3 object storage platform and using Terraform to provision further AWS resources. Sample code for . . .