Presentation: TweetMelting Snowflake Servers with Ansible

A server environment has grown over the years; executing command-line operations, editing configuration files, copying from other servers etc. Everything goes fine until the hardware of the production machine fails. A new server instance needs to build immediately. Installation and configuration manuals describing all the steps remain subject to human interpretation and documentation rot. And it can take hours if not days to discover an environment variable is missing to get the application running again.

While there are many tools available nowadays for describing your infrastructure as a recipe, this is still not common practice in the industry. Mastering these tools turns out to be hard and painful.

Ansible helps you to describe your infrastructure in code. We think it's worth your precious time because in our experience, Ansible is considerably easier to get started with than its relatives Chef and Puppet. For one thing, it does not require extra software on your servers.

In this talk, we'll briefly introduce core Ansible concepts and modules, deploy some servers in the Rackspace cloud. We'll let the demo do most of the talking. You'll find out how much you can benefit from having infrastructure in code.