Ansible 2.1 Released, with Network Automation, Containers
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Re: Ansible 2.1 Released, with Network Automation, Containers
#2now with extendended network support one question gets even more important: how do you do rollbacks with ansible? There is no default mechanism or policy that seems to help with that, so I have to hand-roll my rollbacks?
Re: Ansible 2.1 Released, with Network Automation, Containers
#3now with extendended network support one question gets even more important: how do you do rollbacks with ansible? There is no default mechanism or policy that seems to help with that, so I have to hand-roll my rollbacks?
Yes. There is no way to roll back.
Re: Ansible 2.1 Released, with Network Automation, Containers
#4now with extendended network support one question gets even more important: how do you do rollbacks with ansible? There is no default mechanism or policy that seems to help with that, so I have to hand-roll my rollbacks?
Hand-roll them like a fine cuban cigar. Jokes aside, I would not inherently trust an automatic rollback even if Ansible did support it. You must always provision for worst case failures.
Re: Ansible 2.1 Released, with Network Automation, Containers
#5now with extendended network support one question gets even more important: how do you do rollbacks with ansible? There is no default mechanism or policy that seems to help with that, so I have to hand-roll my rollbacks?
IMO, the use case for rollbacks with Ansible (or Chef/Puppet etc) are done through redeploying prior releases not through trying to remove/replace software on an instance. Same with if you are rolling out a server configuration update (like a certificate), if you need to roll it back you send out the prior configuration.
Am I missing some other detail?
Re: Ansible 2.1 Released, with Network Automation, Containers
#6now with extendended network support one question gets even more important: how do you do rollbacks with ansible? There is no default mechanism or policy that seems to help with that, so I have to hand-roll my rollbacks?
Revert your playbooks and roles to the version of your last good deployment, and redeploy. With good version control, role version management and idempotent library modules, this should be functionally equivalent to a rollback.
There are plenty of caveats to the above (like the fact that the yum module won't downgrade [1], and you'll need reversible DB migrations) but that's basically the procedure.
[1] https://github.com/ansible/ansible-modules-core/issues/1419
Re: Ansible 2.1 Released, with Network Automation, Containers
#7now with extendended network support one question gets even more important: how do you do rollbacks with ansible? There is no default mechanism or policy that seems to help with that, so I have to hand-roll my rollbacks?
The simple answer is: you don't, you "roll forward."
In the event you deploy some code, a DB migration, a server configuration change, etc, and your solution fails after the fact, you move forward, not backwards. Let me explain further.
If you deploy v1.0 of your application and it works, great! If you then deploy v1.1 and it falls over, you find out why, apply a fix, test it locally (Vagrant?), deploy it to a testing environment and perform automated tests (Selenium, jMeter, ...), and once it's working there, you deploy it to production. This is called a hot fix, and it will now be working as intended (unless something else is horribly off the mark in which case you have other issues.)
The key to this example is the local and remote/network-based testing environment(s.) In my opinion, it's very much a realistic goal for ALL organisations of ALL sizes to operate local development environments using Vagrant and VirtualBox; a testing environment that spreads out the whole solution over multiple boxes (for testing networking code and configuration, among many other things); a staging environment for running performance tests (staging should match production bit-for-bit, cpu-for-cpu, ram-for-ram, ...) using jMeter or your choice of tooling; and finally a production environment to serve clients. This is the absolute minimum all organisations should be aiming for, and it doesn't even have to be fully automated using CI and/or CD.
Also tests, such as unit tests, systems tests, integration tests, usability and performance tests, and so on, are also critical to preventing the need to roll back and instead, implementing a roll forward policy.
Re: Ansible 2.1 Released, with Network Automation, Containers
#8Does it support python3 yet ?
Also, why do we have to install aptitude to do system updates ? It has been a long time since apt-get had bad resolution issues (and aptitude isn't installed by default anymore (has it ever been?)).
Re: Ansible 2.1 Released, with Network Automation, Containers
#9I love Ansible, and have been using it since it was a humble little git repo with a single author.
Unfortunately it's probably the most important python package that doesn't support Python 3, it would be cool to see it upgraded. Apparently the hold-up is supporting very old 2.x python versions because of RHEL.
Re: Ansible 2.1 Released, with Network Automation, Containers
#10now with extendended network support one question gets even more important: how do you do rollbacks with ansible? There is no default mechanism or policy that seems to help with that, so I have to hand-roll my rollbacks?
The simple answer is: you don't, you "roll forward." In the event you deploy some code, a DB migration, a server configuration change, etc, and your solution fails after the fact, you move forward, not backwards. Let me explain further. If you deploy v1.0 of your application and it works, great! If you then deploy v1.1 and it falls over, you find out why, apply a fix, test it locally (Vagrant?), deploy it to a testin…
Curious if "roll forward only" could create situations where a failed version change could place the system of interest in a non-functional state until the problem was diagnosed, the code revised, and an update released. If that's possible, I would have concerns about the infrastructure meeting the core needs of the business such as providing value to cutomers.