Beaker Project Infrastructure Management using Ansible

Introduction

Beaker is open-source software for managing and automating labs of test computers.

This repository contains Ansible rules to manage the Beaker infrastructure.

We strongly recommend using Ansible >= 2.14. You can install all necessary requirements via command pip install -r requirements.txt.

Admin-specific Production Settings

You can use group_vars/all/local_settings.yml for you local settings like ansible_become_pass if your computer storage is encrypted. Use --ask-sudo-pass if you don't want to use this method. Currently Ansible is unable to ask when needed so the global setting has been disabled in ansible.cfg.

Dealing with Secrets

We use Ansible Vault (ansible-vault command) to hide some parameters like service credentials or emails to avoid SPAM.

To make it easy all such files are named '*.vault.yml' and git attributes are defined to make diff-ing and merging easy.

Your config needs to be enhanced to tell git how to handle these files. This is very easy, look at this URL for more info: https://github.com/building5/ansible-vault-tools

Improving Ansible Speed

Ansible is slow, but there's a nice project to improve its performance. It still has glitches so it's not enabled by default, but it's easy to enable it.

First install the library (it is not yet packaged):

pip install mitogen

Then you just need to run playbooks this way:

ANSIBLE_STRATEGY=mitogen_linear ansible-playbook …