orchestration

September 2018 Update: Ansible 2.7 (to be released around October 2018) will include a new reboot module, which makes reboots a heck of a lot simpler (whether managing Windows, Mac, or Linux!):

- name: Reboot the server and wait for it to come back up.
  reboot:

That's it! Much easier than the older technique I used in Ansible < 2.7!

One pattern I often need to implement in my Ansible playbooks is "configure-reboot-configure", where you change some setting that requires a reboot to take effect, and you have to wait for the reboot to take place before continuing on with the rest of the playbook run.

For example, on my Raspberry Pi Dramble project, before installing Docker and Kubernetes, I need to make sure the Raspberry Pi's /boot/cmdline.txt file contains a couple cgroup features so Kubernetes runs correctly. But after adding these options, I also have to reboot the Pi.

Recently, Ansible introduced Ansible Container, a tool that builds and orchestrates Docker containers.

While tools that build and orchestrate Docker containers are a dime a dozen these days (seriously... Kubernetes, Mesos, Rancher, Fleet, Swarm, Deis, Kontena, Flynn, Serf, Clocker, Paz, Docker 1.12+ built-in, not to mention dozens of PaaSes), many are built in the weirdly-isolated world of "I only manage containers, and don't manage other infrastructure tasks."

The cool thing about using Ansible to do your container builds and orchestration is that Ansible can also do your networking configuration. And your infrastructure provisioning. And your legacy infrastructure configuration. And on top of that, Ansible is, IMO, the best-in-class configuration management tool—easy for developers and sysadmins to learn and use effectively, and as efficient/terse as (but much more powerful than) shell scripts.

From Ansible Container's own README: