A useful function nested within Ansible is the ability to query remote REST APIs, return the JSON data, parse it and perform subsequent actions based on the data that your get back. When we make the subsequent action sending to a remote Webhook we can then make the function even more powerful (most of the time that is going to be sending a notification to a remote system to let . . .
Previously I’ve looked in detail at the uses of two of Hashicorp’s offering’s; Terraform and Vault. Predictably, the union of these two platforms allows for some ideal ways to further streamline the process of cloud provisioning, in this case by securely handling the myriad secrets needed for cloud shaping and configuration. In this post I’ll be looking at a fairly simple configuration to get started. The sample code for this . . .
In my recent posts I’ve covered the hardened setup of Vault and covered the basics of using the REST API. As we’ve seen so far, Vault is primarily designed for programmatic interactions from external systems via the API, so lets take a look a favourite of mine; Ansible Tower, which is a prime candidate as a third party system which often has a requirement to call secrets from external systems. . . .
In my last post I covered the setup and hardening of Hashicorp’s Vault platform, in this post I’ll be looking at getting to grips with REST API and the Token authentication method. Tokens are core to the Vault authentication system, the platform is at it’s heart designed to be interacted with programmatically by external systems over the API and the UI exists only to make the platform less bewildering for . . .
UPDATE: At the time I wrote this the Netbox Collection was still pretty immature, it isn’t anymore. If you’re trying to do a simple task then you probably just want to go and install the Netbox Collection from Ansible Galaxy and use the native Modules. You can find the Collection here! Ansible Tower and Netbox are two of my favourite tools, and their integration is seemingly painless on the surface . . .
In working with the Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations APIs a couple of things became apparent quickly, the first is that the documentation is pretty dreadful, the second is that the documentation makes wild assumptions about other technologies and is geared directly towards developers. Having come from a sysadmin background this created a problem that a lot of us have had to deal with. It seems unreasonable to complain that . . .