10 Things You Need To Know About Automating Google Cloud with Ansible

GDG DevFest Hamburg 2016 · October 15th, 2016

tgbyte
Thilo-Alexander Ginkel · TG Byte Software GmbH
thilo.ginkel@tgbyte.de · www.tgbyte.de

About us

TG Byte Software GmbH

  • Founded in 1998, located in Hamburg

  • Service Range

    • Software Development & Consulting

    • DevOps

    • Training & Coaching

  • Looking for freelancers to support us with various projects

Thilo-Alexander Ginkel

  • Passionate Software Engineer, IT Consultant & Trainer

  • Focus

    • Software Development & Architecture

    • DevOps

    • Troubleshooting

  • Software Development since 1994

1. Why Automate Google Cloud Configuration?

1. Why Automate Google Cloud Configuration?

  • Consistent system landscape configuration

  • Repeatability

  • Allows efficient implementation of similar environments (dev, test, staging)

2. What’s this "Ansible" All About?

2. What’s this "Ansible" All About?

"An ansible is a fictional machine capable of instantaneous or superluminal communication. It can send and receive messages to and from a corresponding device over any distance whatsoever with no delay."

— Source: Wikipedia

2. What’s this "Ansible" All About?

  • Lightweight configuration management

    • Based on idempotent tasks declared as YAML

    • Push-based approach (in contrast to what is typically used with Puppet or Chef)

  • Typically used to configure servers

  • But: Using "infrastructure as code" paradigm it can also be used to manage infrastructure

2. What’s this "Ansible" All About?

# Example
---
- name: hello world
  hosts: all
  tasks:
    - name: submit greetings
      debug:
        msg: "Hello DevFest Hamburg!"

3. Why use Ansible for GCE?

3. Why use Ansible for GCE?

  • Use single solution for all your configuration management needs

    • Provision Google Cloud infrastructure and hosts using the same tool chain

  • Enables multi-cloud scenarios

4. What Can Be Automated?

4. What Can Be Automated?

  • Ansible ships with a set of Google Cloud related modules for:

    • GCE Instances ("VMs")

    • GCE Persistent Disks

    • GCE Images

    • Google Cloud DNS

    • Google Cloud Load Balancer

    • Google Cloud Networks / Firewall Rules

    • Google Cloud Storage

5. Examples

GCE Instances

- name: create GCE instance
  gce:
    disks: example-disk
    instance_names: example-instance
    machine_type: n1-standard-1
    zone: europe-west1-d

GCE Persistent Disks

- name: create GCE disk
  gce_pd:
    name: example-disk
    image: debian-8
    mode: READ_WRITE
    size_gb: 100
    zone: europe-west1-d

Google Cloud Networks / Firewall Rules

- name: allow traffic from load-balancer
  gce_net:
     name: default
     fwname: default-allow-loadbalancer-80
     allowed: tcp:80
     src_range: 130.211.0.0/22

6. But…​

6. But…​

  • Some of these modules do not offer feature parity with what Google Cloud offers

  • For some Google Cloud features there is no Ansible module at all

7. But…​ What About The Rest?

7. But…​ What About The Rest?

  • gcloud CLI to the rescue

    • Exposes most Google Cloud operations from the command line

  • Extra effort needed to make sure operations are idempotent

Example

- name: check if SSL certificate is registered with GCE
  command: >
    gcloud compute ssl-certificates describe example-ssl-cert
      --format json
  ignore_errors: yes
  changed_when: false
  failed_when: false
  register: describe_ssl_cert_result

- name: register SSL cert with GCE
  command: >
    gcloud compute ssl-certificates create example-ssl-cert
      --certificate "dir/cert.pem"
      --private-key "dir/key.pem"
  when: describe_ssl_cert_result | failure

8. Phew, That’s Somewhat Complicated…​

8. Phew, That’s Somewhat Complicated…​

  • Solution

    • Integrate Google Cloud Deployment Manager with Ansible

    • Describes Google Cloud infrastructure as YAML

    • Yet another CLI invocation, but a rather simple one

    • Keeps the Ansible integration for an all-in-one deployment in place

9. Show Me Some Code! (aka. The Demo)

10. Summary

10. Summary

  • Ansible can be used as a facilitator to bridge the gap between infrastructure and system provisioning and deployment

  • There is a basic set of native bindings

  • When these do not suffice, either manual gcloud command line usage or Google Cloud Deployment Manager can be easily integrated into the Ansible provisioning process

Thanks! Any Questions?

@thiloginkel · thilo.ginkel@tgbyte.de