Multi-Stage Provisioning with Ansible

Abstract:

How to configure your server landscape is always difficult. You have servers of different kinds, like web servers and database servers on the one hand and you have different stages, like "development" and "production" on the other. Puppet, Chef and Ansible simplify such configuration, but you really need a clear model of what you want to achieve and how to map that to the capabilities of your toolbox. Ansible is easy to learn and your playbooks can become powerful very fast. But it is not so obvious how to model multiple "stages" with Ansible.

In this talk a very quick overview of Ansible is given and different solutions to handle multi-stage provisioning are explained and contrasted with the mechanisms of Puppet and Chef. It is not a comparison, in the sense: what is best -- but simply a comparison of the models and mechanisms of these tools in a certain (important) dimension.

Speaker: Victor Volle