Getting Started with Ansible and Serverspec (Breakout Session)
Provisioning a server by hand is an onerous job, but it's one most library developers have done. And you've certainly heard that there are tools to help you manage this task in a more organized fashion. This workshop will walk you through how to use Ansible [1], one such tool, to set up a new service on a new machine. The focus will be on hands-on learning, walking through the common mistakes one can make when using Ansible. You'll gain a confidence in the tool, and learn that the error messages Ansible returns are actually useful in finding those mistakes. You will quickly discover that using Ansible is pretty similar to what you've previously done by hand. You may even have shell scripts written to help you with provisioning; those existing scripts can easily be modified to work with Ansible. We will also make use of Serverspec [2], a tool which allows you to characterize the services running on an existing server, and then use this specification to test and verify the results of your efforts with Ansible. Audience: developers, with some operations experience. Requirements: participants should bring a notebook computer on which they have admin privileges. Ideally, participants should already have installed VirtualBox [3], Vagrant [4], and Git [5]. Acknowledgements: The curriculum for this workshop was originally developed by Alicia Cozine, of Data Curation Experts. [1] https://www.ansible.com/ [2] http://serverspec.org/ [3] http://www.virtualbox.org/ [4] http://www.vagrantup.com/ [5] http://git-scm.com/"
