Recently I’ve been having some fun moving my lab and home infrastructure to Kubernetes. I had a feeling that deploying the UniFi Controller was going to be a bit of a painful process but it’s not so bad. Has This Already Been Done? Well, allegedly. The UniFi Controller has long been a Linux application so theoretically there are no real issues in the way. My initial searching led me to . . .
In Part 1 of this project we covered building the infrastructure that underpins Kubernetes; the Virtual Machines that make up it’s Control and Data Planes, implementing high availability, bootstrapping the core Kubernetes components and considerations for the various networking elements. All of this is great, but after all of that all our cluster doesn’t actually do very much yet. It’s still in a pretty raw state and not ready to . . .
My home lab has been getting a bit long in the tooth recently. These days I work mostly with container platforms and Infrastructure as Code but those are mostly put to work inside the opaque walls of public cloud providers and not on bare metal (I.E. my own physical or virtual servers). When it comes to container platforms, Kubernetes is the one I spend most of my time with. Running . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
In the previous post we looked at how to build Chartmuseum on Ubuntu Linux with an S3 backend, however out of the box this system presents a number of problems; specifically it isn’t TLS encrypted and the service runs on an unprivileged TCP port. I could see no guides suggesting how to do this, so lets take a look at how to solve this problem by performing by proxying our . . .
Helm is an incredibly popular package manager for Kubernetes, however despite it’s incredibly widespread use there isn’t a huge amount of information or options out there for creating private repositories using Open Source platforms. Chartmuseum seeks to solve this problem by offering us just that. In this post I’m looking at how to deploy and bootstrap Chartmuseum on Ubuntu Linux 18.04, using a secure AWS S3 backend. Getting Started Chartmuseum . . .
When I first started using Ansible, querying JSON was a source of constant frustration. Most of the articles I could find on the topic seem particularly interested in a long lesson on the topic of how JSON is structured. Whilst that is important to understand I couldn’t really find a guide that just broke down a few simple queries like I wanted. I’m not even going to attempt to talk . . .
In previous posts we’ve looked at how to look up Secrets from Hashicorp Vault using Ansible and Ansible Tower. We’ve also taken a look at how to integrate Azure Key Vault with Ansible Tower, however I’ve never gotten round to taking a look at how to integrate Ansible itself with Azure Key Vault (without the use of Tower). Whilst I’ve largley moved away from using Azure Key Vault in favour . . .
Previously I’ve looked at how to lookup secrets from Hashicorp Vault using Ansible Tower however whilst that functionality is incredibly valuable it doesn’t really tackle the issue of how to write Playbooks which can interact with Vault. In this post we’ll look at how we can use some excellent lookup functionality provided as part of the ansible which provides this functionality. Some Assumptions For this article, I’m going to be . . .