Previously we looked at using Localstack to emulate AWS services and speed up the feedback loop during development. In this short post we’re going to look at how to integrate this tool with Terraform to perform some simple testing that can emulate our builds for free and give us some confidence in our code before running it. This post will assume that you have Localstack installed and running. If not, . . .
One of the challenges that seems to crop up pretty frequently is reliably simulating a cloud platform or application without having to tediously configure a sandbox environment for every little change. Even when a sandbox is present, the cost of operating them can quickly run out of control and can still need several people to implement even a small change. Localstack is an emulator for an ever growing number of . . .
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 . . .