Installing Ansible AWX

Starting to look at a nice front end for Ansible and found a few quirks with the process that need to be taken care of.

The actual installation of AWX needs Ansible installing on the system you’re installing from. As I’m installing from localhost to localhost this means I need Ansible installed locally. Sounds obvious, but it’s not in the prerequisites. You need to install, docker, docker-compose, the docker-compose python module AND ansible.

PowerDNS and ISC DHCPD

As we host lots of sites we have lot’s of DNS. Currently it’s a database driven old version of ISC BIND. There are certain tasks we need to do manually to add records like SPF and TXT and there is no dynamic update. Our main aims are to have a easier means of our support staff updating domains with all the modern records for DMARC and DKIM, but also lets us use dynamic entries to help with the Let’s Encrypt certificate creation process.

We have a strategy that all our deployments begin as virtual first to keep things as mobile and as resilient as possible. This means Docker or KVM, before we look to deploying natively. This solution is going to be within a Docker container set.

Performance Monitoring

With glances on Linux we are able to get a good overview of performance, including the dockers that are running. Rather than simply watch this on screen we can port the data into an InfluxDB (time-series database) and produce nice graphs from current and historic data.