Leveraging the Ansible APITyler Turk – DevOps Engineer at WP Engine

Who am I?

DevOps Engineer at WP Engine

Enjoys Operations, Development, and long walks on the beach

Ansible API

Ansible API Use Cases

• Server Provisioning Automation

• Wrapping Ansible calls in scripts

• Gaining deeper understanding of

the Ansible internals

Best Examples – Ansible Code Itself!

Ansible Ansible Playbook

Breaking it Down – Ansible API

3 module parameters

• Module Name

• Module Path

• Module Arguments

Several Authentication Options

• Remote user / pass

• User / pass / options for su(do)

• Vault password

• Private Key

Breaking it Down – Ansible API• Inventory / Pattern / Subset

• Timeout

• Forks

• Callbacks

• Transport method

• Check / Diff options

Breaking it Down – Ansible-Playbook API

Shares many of the same arguments

Includes new arguments:

• Playbook (obviously!)

• Callbacks for runner and playbook

• Stats

• Extra variables

• Tag logic (skip, only)

• Force / flush handlers

Inventory Management

• Need to define inventory

• Can define subset

• Easy to instantiate

Ansible Plugins

Types of plugins:

• Connection Type

• Lookup

• Vars

• Filter

• Callbacks

Callback Plugins – Ooo, interesting…

• Customize actions

• Aggregate/manipulate results

• Create historic logs and

dashboards

Examples!

Questions? There are some “less good” ones…