ansible

Ansible for Drupal infrastructure and deployments - DrupalCon LA 2015 BoF

We had a great discussion about how different companies and individuals are using Ansible for Drupal infrastructure management and deployments at DrupalCon LA, and I wanted to post some slides from my (short) intro to Ansible presentation here, as well as a few notes from the presentation.

The slides are below:

And video/audio from the BoF:

Notes from the BoF

If first gave an overview of the basics of Ansible, demonstrating some Ad-Hoc commands on my Raspberry Pi Dramble (a cluster of six Raspberry Pi 2 computers running Drupal 8), then we dove headfirst into a great conversation about Ansible and Drupal.

Lessons Learned building the Raspberry Pi Dramble

Raspberry Pi Dramble Bramble Cluster

Edit: Many people have been asking for more technical detail, benchmarks, etc. There is much more information available on the Raspberry Pi Dramble Wiki (e.g. Power Consumption, microSD card benchmarks, etc.), if you're interested.

After the Raspberry Pi 2 model B was released, I decided the Pi was finally a fast enough computing platform (with its 4-core 900 MHz ARMv7 architecture) with enough memory (1 GB per Pi) to actually use for web infrastructure. If not in a production environment (I would definitely avoid putting the Pi into a role as a high-load 24x7x365 server), then for development and/or testing purposes. And for some fun!

Ansible + Drupal + Raspberry Pi Dramble - Presentation at MidCamp 2015

Earlier today, I gave a presentation on Ansible and Drupal 8 at MidCamp in Chicago. In the presentation, I introduced Ansible, then deployed and updated a Drupal 8 site on a cluster of 6 Raspberry Pi computers, nicknamed the Dramble.

Video from the presentation is below (sadly, slides/voice only—you can't see the actual cluster of Raspberry Pis... for that, come see me in person sometime!):

My slides from the presentation are embedded below, and I'll be posting a video of the presentation as soon as it's available.

MidCamp 2015 - Ansible + Drupal 8 Presentation

On March 21, I gave a presentation on Ansible and Drupal 8 at MidCamp in Chicago. Video and slides from the presentation are embedded below:

Ansible + Drupal: A Fortuitous DevOps Match from geerlingguy

Human-readable configuration syntax. Great user experience. Designed for high availability and flexibility. Includes everything you need to achieve your development goals.

Ansible deployments Visualized with a Raspberry Pi cluster

Raspberry Pi Dramble - cluster of Raspberry Pi computers

For the past few weeks, I've been building a cluster of six Raspberry Pis to test and demonstrate Ansible playbooks for Drupal deployment at upcoming events (like MidCamp and DrupalCon LA).

I added an RGB LED to each of the Raspberry Pis that can be controlled via software (for example, here's a Python script to turn on one individual color on the LED), and as part of the demonstration, I'm using the LEDs to indicate which server Ansible is currently working with.

Setting up GlusterFS with Ansible

NOTE: This blog post was written prior to Ansible including the gluster_volume module, and is out of date; the examples still work, but Ansible for DevOps has been since updated with a more relevant and complete example. You can read about it here: Simple GlusterFS Setup with Ansible (Redux).

Modern infrastructure often involves some amount of horizontal scaling; instead of having one giant server, with one storage volume, one database, one application instance, etc., most apps use two, four, ten, or dozens of servers.

Many applications can be scaled horizontally with ease, but what happens when you need shared resources, like files, application code, or other transient data, to be shared on all the servers? And how do you have this data scale out with your infrastructure, in a fast but reliable way? There are many different approaches to synchronizing or distributing files across servers:

Introducing the Dramble - Raspberry Pi 2 cluster running Drupal 8

Dramble - 6 Raspberry Pi 2 model Bs running Drupal 8 on a cluster
Version 0.9.3 of the Dramble—running Drupal 8 on 6 Raspberry Pis

I've been tinkering with computers since I was a kid, but in the past ten or so years, mainstream computing has become more and more locked down, enclosed, lightweight, and, well, polished. I even wrote a blog post about how, nowadays, most computers are amazing. Long gone are the days when I had to worry about line voltage, IRQ settings, diagnosing bad capacitors, and replacing 40-pin cables that went bad!

But I'm always tempted back into my earlier years of more hardware-oriented hacking when I pull out one of my Raspberry Pi B+/A+ or Arduino Unos. These devices are as raw of modern computers as you can get—requiring you to actual touch the silicone chips and pins to be able to even use the devices. I've been building a temperature monitoring network that's based around a Node.js/Express app using Pis and Arduinos placed around my house. I've also been working a lot lately on a project that incorporates three of my current favorite technologies: The Raspberry Pi 2 model B (just announced earlier this month), Ansible, and Drupal!

In short, I'm building a cluster of Raspberry Pis, and designating it a 'Dramble'—a 'bramble' of Raspberry Pis running Drupal 8.

Highly-Available PHP infrastructure with Ansible

I just posted a large excerpt from Ansible for DevOps over on the Server Check.in blog: Highly-Available Infrastructure Provisioning and Configuration with Ansible. In it, I describe a simple set of playbooks that configures a highly-available infrastructure primarily for PHP-based websites and web applications, using Varnish, Apache, Memcached, and MySQL, each configured in a way optimal for high-traffic and highly-available sites.

Here's a diagram of the ultimate infrastructure being built:

Highly Available Infrastructure

Highly-Available Infrastructure Provisioning and Configuration with Ansible

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 8 of Ansible for DevOps, a book on Ansible by Jeff Geerling. The example highlights Ansible's simplicity and flexibility by provisioning and configuring of a highly available web application infrastructure on a local Vagrant-managed cloud, DigitalOcean droplets, and Amazon Web Services EC2 instances, with one set of Ansible playbooks.

tl;dr Check out the code on GitHub, and buy the book to learn more about Ansible!

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