What the Hack: Infrastructure As Code with Ansible

Ansible allows you to automate the creation, configuration and deployment of Azure resources via Ansible playbooks.

Introduction

DevOps is a journey not a destination.

Infrastructure-as-Code is one of the first steps you need to take on your DevOps journey!

This hack will help you learn:

Challenge 1: Create an Azure resource group using Ansible

Create a YAML file named rg.yml. Using Ansible and the YAML file you created, create a resource group named ansible-rg in the East US 2 Azure region. Deploy the resource group using ansible-playbook

Challenge 2: Create an Azure Virtual Network

Create an Azure Virtual Network using Ansible. Create a YAML file named WTHVNetAN.yml. The virtual network should have an address space of 10.2.0.0/16 and be named “WTHVNetAN”. Add one subnet to it with an address range of 10.2.0.0/24 and name it “default”

Challenge 3: Create a public IP address

Create a public IP address using Ansible that you will use to access your Azure VM via SSH later. Put it in the resource group ansible-rg. Name the public IP address ansible-pip. Use static allocation for the public IP address.

Challenge 4: Create a Network Security Group

Create a Network Security Group using Ansible that you will use to protect your Azure VM so that it is only accessible via TCP port 22 inbound. Put the NSG in the resource group ansible-rg. Name the NSG ansible-nsg-ssh. Set the priority to 1001.

Challenge 5: Create a Linux Virtual Machine

Create a Linux VM using Ansible. You will first need to create a Network Interface Card. Use the following settings for the NIC:

Resource group: ansible-rg Name: ansible-VM-nic Public IP address: ansible-pip VNet: WTHVNETAN Subnet: default Security Group: ansible-nsg-ssh

The VM will use all of the Azure resources you have previously created. Use the following settings:

VM Name: anlinuxvm01 Resource Group: ansible-rg VM Size: Standard_DS1_v2 Admin username: azureuser SSH password enabled: false SSH public keys: [use the public key you created in the prequisites section] Network interfaces: ansible-VM-nic Managed Disk Type: Premium_LRS Image: CentOS 7.5 (or Ubuntu 18.04 if you prefer)

Ensure that you can SSH to the VM using its public IP address with ssh azureuser@[public ip address]

Hint: You can use the Azure CLI command az vm list-ip-addresses to find the IP address for the newly created VM.

Challenge 6: Install NGINX on a Linux Virtual Machine

Install the NGINX web server on an existing Linux Virtual Machine. To do this you will need to create an inventory.cfg and a YAML file. The inventory.cfg has information about the VM you want to manage and the location of the Python interpreter. To find the location of Python, you will need to SSH to the VM and look in /usr/bin. Use the latest version

It should look something like this:

[web]
{Your public IP address of the Linux VM} ansible_user=azureuser

[web:vars]
ansible_python_interpreter={location of python install}

Once you have the inventory.cfg, you will create the Ansible Playbook YAML file that will install NGINX. First, you will update all apt (Ubuntu) or yum (Redhat/CentOS) packages to the latest version. For RedHat/CentOS you will need install the EPEL repository (epel-release) before we install NGINX. Next, you will install NGINX using apt or yum in the file and set the service to running.

To use the inventory.cfg file you will need to run the following Ansible playbook command which will use the inventory.cfg and YAML file you created earlier. The -b switch tells Ansible to run as root using sudo.

ansible-playbook -i inventory.cfg {yaml file} -b

Ensure that NGINX is running by running Curl from an SSH terminal with curl http://127.0.0.1