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[post_date] => 2019-02-19 19:48:42
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[post_content] => This technical guide will walk you through the installations of Ansible v2.4.2.0, an open source configuration management and deployment tool, and Ansible Tower (web layer for Ansible) v3.4.1 on a RHEL 7 virtual machine. Ansible Tower is a RedHat supported and paid version of AWX, which is open source. We will first enable the required repos:
Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => Installation Guide: Ansible & Ansible Tower - Day 1
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[post_content] => You may have heard the term Microservices when talking about applications, and some cases even when talking about underlying infrastructure. If you've worked with any OOPS language, you must be familiar with the concept of abstraction and modularization. Extend that idea to an application - the breakdown of independent functions abstracted in to separate services; with a bunch of services working together forming an application. Typically, the more fine grained and decoupled your services are, the more scalability can be achieved. Let's take a look at some of the reasons why it is important for your critical applications to be be implemented with a microservices architecture framework -
Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => What is Microservices Architecture?
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[post_content] => If you've tried to install Kong from scratch, you know that it is a little more involved than what is posted on the official website guide. There are some pre-requisites that the system needs to be set up with, in order to make sure the service installs and runs successfully. Let us take a look at the steps involved in setting up a Kong instance from the ground up. This guide is valid for RHEL 7, PostgreSQL 11, and Kong 0.14.1. We will set up Kong on a VMware virtual machine. If you are using another hypervisor, the steps for hardware configurations may differ slightly. First, let us take a look at the pre-requisite steps that need to be addressed before we begin our work.
Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => Installing Kong: A First Day Guide
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[post_content] => We've all heard that containers and cloud technologies help us avoid lock-ins. While most of that is true, you could be unintentionally locking yourself to a particular technology or framework, if you are not careful. Let's talk about some important aspects to consider, when you are evaluating a cloud or a container platform. 1. Compile a list the features you want a platform to have, based on your requirements Your needs to consume a hybrid cloud architecture may be different from other organizations. The vision of having more flexibility and agility may be the same, but your workloads are different. It is important to know the in-depth architecture of the applications and workloads you want to live in the cloud or container environment. 2. Support You may have thousands of commercial-off-the-shelf applications, and hundreds of custom built ones. Some application vendors may not support containerizing their applications. There could be regulatory or other limitations that prevent certain legacy applications from being supported on containers. Depending upon how critical and integral such applications are to your business, you may want to consider newer offerings that make the full use of cloud and containerization benefits like microservices architecture. 3. Licensing and Exit costs Platform cost is always a factor, no matter the size of the organization. One of the native benefits that containerization provides, is the ability to control costs – assuming your applications are architected accordingly. For example, a cloud-native application can be scaled in to public cloud for just the webtier when necessary (assuming microservices architecture) rather than spinning up large capacity VMs on demand in the cloud for monolithic applications. Another important consideration is around how the platforms are priced. A platform that prices based on worker nodes may be more feasible for an organization that plans on developing hundreds or thousands of microservices, and making them run efficiently on worker nodes. A platform priced based on the number of applications containerized may be more feasible for monolithic applications. You will need to take in to account how your organization plans to scale the containerizing of applications, and what the application architectures will be like. Although you will be making a decision based on long term usage of the platform, it is always a good idea to see what the exit costs will be once you decide to move away from the chosen platform. As an exercise, see if you can figure out what changes would need to be made to the application architecture, the deployment architecture, resource skill sets, and more, if you were to move away from the chosen platform. That can then serve as a yardstick for how locked-in you might be, upon choosing a particular solution. There will always be some level of customization effort an lock-in, no matter which solution you choose – but the idea would be to minimize the monetary and non-monetary exit costs. 4. Detailed architecture knowledge about your applications Nobody wants to make major technology adoption decisions based on hearsay. It is critical to know the detailed application architectures, as that will guide you towards choosing the right solution. If the bulk of your application workloads are legacy monolithic applications, the primary tangible benefit obtained by containerizing them will be horizontal scaling. This is assuming the application vendors will support the containerized versions, the applications will allow multiple instances running within the same sub-net, the application can be used with a load balancer, and so on. To leverage the self-healing and other native capabilities offered by containers, the cloud-native applications developed in a microservices architecture would be an ideal workload. But in the real-world, there is always going to be a mix of legacy and newer workloads. For highly regulated industries like healthcare, insurance, banking, and others – legacy applications may form the biggest chunk of their workloads. If you have the time, it would be ideal to do a cost-benefit analysis for legacy workloads to compare the benefits offered by horizontal scalability and the like, before choosing to move forward with containerization. 5. Implementing vendor agnostic tools, and processes, refactoring if necessary Choosing a platform is just one piece of this complex puzzle involving the rollout of new technologies. There are critical tasks pre- and post- containerization, that also need to be accounted for. For example, how easy or difficult will it be to refactor the existing application for a chosen platform? How easy or difficult will it be to monitor the performance of the chosen platform? How easy or difficult will it be to integrate the chosen platform with other toolsets? Will there be changes needed to your existing processes or toolsets, so they can work effectively with the chosen platform? The end goal for most organizations is to have an easy transition path into Cloud and Container platforms – and to use these platforms as effective tools for their IT teams and business in general. This vision can be best achieved by having a vendor agnostic strategy, and avoiding vendor lock-ins wherever possible. Associates at Keyva have helped multiple organizations assess their application readiness and move them in to containerized and cloud environments. Keyva also helps with the pre- and post- containerization steps. These include things like refactoring existing applications, adding a wrapper over current applications so they can be consumed easily by DevOps processes, and more. If you'd like to have us review your environment and provide suggestions on what might work for you, please contact us at [email protected]
Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => Avoid Cloud & Container Vendor Lock-In
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[post_content] => You might've heard this before – configuration management database (CMDB) should be the single source of truth. But what does that mean? And how can you achieve it? With all the different third party applications in your environment, you might think it could be a gargantuan effort to consolidate all the data in to the CMDB. It may be a decent amount of work, but the reality is that it is easier than what most would anticipate. By taking the 3 step approach below, you can come close to configuration management database nirvana – a current and accurate CMDB: Step 1: Develop, and agree on a configuration management database schema, and the necessary mappings This step requires the IT Service Management (ITSM) teams, and the various business units to agree on a configuration management database schema and how it will be organized. ITSM teams would create data mappings – to help map data captured from various software components in the environment, into the specified fields within the CMDB schema. This would also include activities around customization of various fields within the CMDB forms, and customizations around API access. Step 2: Integrate and Automate Integrate the configuration management database with all sources of data as per the identified data mappings. This can be done by leveraging existing integrations, or by creating new ones. The population of data within the CMDB can be done as part of an extract-transfer-load process (retrospectively), or as part of the creation of a CI using automation (prospectively). The process of CMDB population is a multi-step process, whereby data is captured via one of the discovery tools and automatically updated within the CMDB. Automation of CI population also helps create relationships between CIs and Change tickets or Incident tickets, thereby making the review process for Change Advisory Boards much easier. Step 3: Optimize and Reconcile Once the data is in the configuration management database, it is important to make sure it is accurate. Given that many different sources of data may compete for the same target field within the CMDB, weights can be assigned to each source to improve accuracy. For example, the asset tag of a device may have a higher weightage when that data is coming from a discovery tool, but the CPU information captured within a configuration management system can be trusted more than any other source. Furthermore, the data captured from all the various sources should be put in staging datasets. It is up to the administrators of the system, to define rule sets and reconciliation rules that will automatically filter the required data in to production data set for consumption. The above may seem like oversimplification of the tasks required to have a fully functional CMDB, but many organizations have successfully adopted a version of this breakdown. It is highly likely that the most time will be spent upfront during the configuration management database schema and data mapping exercise. By investing time and effort towards having an accurate CMDB, organizations can effectively understand the various configurations and their relationships within in the environment, and thereby easily track and manage them. Associates at Keyva have been helping customers set up and optimize their ITSM and CMDB systems for the past two decades. We've also helped organizations develop integrations between configuration management database and third party application software so as to accelerate the population of the CMDB, and to keep it current and accurate. If you'd like to have us review your environment and provide suggestions on what might work for you, please contact us at [email protected]
Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => 3 Steps to Achieving Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Nirvana
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[post_modified] => 2020-01-22 17:56:20
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[post_date] => 2019-01-11 16:54:38
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[post_content] => If you have tried setting up a DevOps pipeline to achieve continuous deployment, and ran into configuration drift issues - you will know the pains quite well. A consistent and uniform configuration is a prerequisite to any automation. If the automated workflow finds that the target configuration is not as anticipated, it will either take the exception route, or revert to notification for manual intervention. What is configuration drift? When a given system configuration or an application configuration changes from the "blessed" or "vetted" state, to another state, it is called configuration drift. For example, if the IT team provides web server instance with a preset configuration file, and as part of the application deployment process or application customization process, that configuration is changed – that constitutes a configuration drift. Similar drifts can occur at the OS level, for packages or commercial software. Why does it matter? It is important to mitigate and remediate any configuration drifts because without it, the environment will become unmanageable, especially as you scale. Consider the web server example above, when there is an application outage in your production environment. As part of finding the root cause of failure, you will now also need to walk back the steps of every configuration changed from the original version, to rule out any issues caused because of those changes. This can cause time and efforts to be deployed towards tangential activities. With consistent deployment automation, you can confidently evaluate the issues plaguing the core application, given all other things to be constant. Another reason that reducing or preventing configuration drift is paramount, is to make sure that any additional deployments on the base tier can be automated. In the above example, it is much easier to automate application deployment on a web server delivered as PaaS, than deploying the same application on a web server that might've been customized, or drifted from its desired state. How to mitigate or prevent configuration drift? There are many ways you can address the resolution of configuration drift. The common factor for all scenarios is to make sure the deployments are automated. Firstly, you'd have to define what constitutes a configuration drift. For example, if you are providing your customers with IaaS machines, would adding a new printer constitute configuration drift? Or would that be classified under allowed customizations, that have no material effect on your service delivery? The rules of configuration will need to be defined. Secondly, you'd want to automate the deployments of your builds and configurations. This could mean using an orchestration framework to deploy the desired service through a self-service catalog, or another automated mechanism. Thirdly, you'd want to make sure that the release and update process for various infrastructure and application components flows through a source control management (SCM) system. Any and all deployments should pick up the latest version of the configs from SCM. And by deploying a systems configuration management solution, you can now check the configuration states of your target systems against the latest versions of those configurations in SCM. There are many other steps you can take to mitigate configuration drift, depending upon the severity of the drift and the penalty you pay for not addressing it. Keyva has helped several organizations address the common challenge of preventing configuration drift. There are several processes and tools an organization can use to address their customized needs for preventing configuration drifts in their infrastructure and applications. If you'd like to have us review your environment and provide suggestions on what might work for you, please contact us at [email protected]
Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => Configuration Drift : The Bane of Continuous Deployments
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[post_content] => Over the last few years, we've all been exposed to different meanings of the word "Cloud". Similarly, other terms like "Application Development" and "Application Modernization" are sometimes used nebulously as well. Application Development could mean a few different things – it could be creating an integration between two existing software modules using APIs, or it could be mobile application development, or it could mean developing a standalone computer program that serves a business purpose, or it could mean all of the above. No one term is more correct than the other. It depends on what is relevant for you, and how you define an application. Application Modernization could also cover a few things – it could mean recoding an application in a new programming language, or moving the application from one platform to another, or moving it to the public cloud, or making the application architecture more agile and breaking it down in to microservices framework. If the objective is to have your legacy application leverage all the benefits available from a distributed Cloud architecture, the process to make the necessary modifications to that application's architecture or implementation is referred to as Application Modernization. "Cloud-Native" is the term used to describe the characteristics of born-in-the-cloud applications. These applications are built to be used in a distributed fashion, are services aware, resilient, and scalable. But the largest proportion of applications in many industries are still run within legacy on-premises environments. Short of doing a rip-and-replace for those functional applications, there is a need to transform and modernize these legacy applications to fit the new Cloud architectures. Here are some things to consider reviewing, as part of the application modernization process:
Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => Application Modernization: A Path to Cloud-Native
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[post_date] => 2018-12-13 16:00:37
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[post_content] => By Anuj Tuli, Chief Technology Officer Here are the steps to installing Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform from scratch, for your lab or dev environments. We will walk through setting up the OC cluster with 1 master and 1 node, but you can set up as many nodes as you'd like. Since we are not setting up the master nodes in HA configuration, we'd recommend this setup be limited to your lab environments. This guide is valid for RHEL 7, and OSE 3.5. We will set up Openshift Container Platform on VMware virtual machines. If you are using KVM or another hypervisor, the steps for hardware configurations may differ slightly. First, let us take a look at the pre-requisite steps that need to be addressed before we begin our work. This applies to both VMs (Master VM and Node VM):
Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => Installation Guide: Ansible & Ansible Tower - Day 1
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sudo subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-ansible-2.6-rpms subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-desktop-optional-rpmsYou can install the latest version of ansible using Yum:
yum install ansible(Since we will be installing Ansible Tower on this same machine, it is recommended to use the Yum method to install Ansible). -OR- You can build the RPM package by downloading the latest version of Ansible code from Git. If choosing this method, first we will need to get all the pre-requisite libraries ready (some of these are optional):
yum update yum install python-dev python-pip wget yum install git yum update -y nss curl libcurl yum install rpm-build yum -y install pythonDownload the latest code, and build:
mkdir ansible cd ansible/ git clone https://github.com/ansible/ansible.git systemctl stop firewalld systemctl disable firewalld cd ./ansible/ make rpm rpm -Uvh ./rpm-build/ansible-*.noarch.rpmOnce installed, you can view and modify the default Ansible hosts file at /etc/ansible/hosts You can also verify successful installation using the command:
ansible –-versionNow, we can go ahead and set up Ansible Tower on this machine. We will be using the integrated installation, which installs the GUI, the REST API, and the database – all on the same machine:
mkdir ansible-tower cd ansible-tower/ wget https://releases.ansible.com/ansible-tower/setup-bundle/ansible-tower-setup-bundle-3.4.1-1.el7.tar.gz tar xvzf ansible-tower-setup-bundle-3.4.1-1.el7.tar.gz cd ansible-tower-setup-bundle-3.4.1-1.el7/Tower connects to the PostgreSQL database using password authentication. We will need to create a md5 hash to configure Tower to talk with the database. Replace <CUSTOM-DB-PASSWORD> with a password of your choosing:
python -c 'from hashlib import md5; print("md5" + md5("<CUSTOM-DB-PASSWORD>" + "awx").hexdigest())'Make a note of the hash key generated from this command. We will use it for our next step. We have to now update the inventory file (located within ansible-tower-setup-bundle-3.4.1-1.el7 directory) with the passwords for the database, the hash key generated above, and a custom password of our choosing for rabbit_mq. Find the following lines and update them accordingly. First, for setting the admin password for the consoleadmin_password='AdminPassword'Next, set the password for database connectivity. Please note, this password should be the same as what you used to replace <CUSTOM-DB-PASSWORD> during the hash key generation step above. Also, we will paste the copied hash key, and set it for the hashed password line
pg_password='password' pg_hashed_password='md5f58b4d5d85dbde46651335d78bb56b8c'And finally, choose a custom password for rabbit_mq
rabbitmq_password='password'We are now ready to run the setup script
./setup.shOnce all the steps are completed successfully, you can verify the Tower installation by going to the URL
https://<MACHINE-IP-OR-FQDN>:443You can use the admin credentials (username: admin, password: admin password as defined in the inventory file) to log in and access the console. You can request a free Ansible Tower license for an evaluation environment of up to 10 nodes, or can purchase a RedHat subscription for larger environments, and some additional logging, management and support features. If you have any questions about the steps documented here, would like more information on the installation procedure, or have any feedback or requests, please let us know at [email protected].
Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => Installation Guide: Ansible & Ansible Tower - Day 1
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[post_modified] => 2019-02-21 19:08:28
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[post_content] => You may have heard the term Microservices when talking about applications, and some cases even when talking about underlying infrastructure. If you've worked with any OOPS language, you must be familiar with the concept of abstraction and modularization. Extend that idea to an application - the breakdown of independent functions abstracted in to separate services; with a bunch of services working together forming an application. Typically, the more fine grained and decoupled your services are, the more scalability can be achieved. Let's take a look at some of the reasons why it is important for your critical applications to be be implemented with a microservices architecture framework -Scalability: By splitting down the function of an application in to a microservices, it can be scaled independently of other functions or components. For example, a microservice responsible for managing database connections can scale independently of the web tier, if the db connection pool size is to be increased.
Decoupling: Separating the functions into individual services provides flexibility for design, implementation, and maintenance of those individual services.
Continuous Delivery & Updates: Functional upgrades can be released without affecting other components. Each function or service can have its own release pipeline, list of enhancements, and priority for feature releases.
Error Micro-segmentation: Error in one service will be isolated within that service. Faults will not propagate to other functions as they are modularized and separated. Also, releasing an update to address the issue is quicker and more efficient in this architecture.
Parallel Development & Domain Expertise: Each service can have domain specific experts working on it. In the case of monolithic applications, the entire application stack needs to be updated for feature releases, as well as development is stymied because of complexity and interdependencies.
Reduced Deployment Time: Individual services can be deployed with a focus on function specific features and environments. Development, testing, and pipeline release is for smaller modules rather than the entire application stack. Frequent updates can be made to individual services, and those updates can be deployed in production much faster.
If you need assistance in determining the feasibility of transforming your applications from monolithic to microservices architecture, Keyva can help. Associates at Keyva have worked with many different organizations in various verticals to help in application modernization projects. These include things like refactoring existing applications, adding a wrapper over current applications so they can be consumed easily by DevOps processes, and more. If you'd like to have us review your environment and provide suggestions on what might work for you, please contact us at [email protected]. Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => What is Microservices Architecture?
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[post_content] => If you've tried to install Kong from scratch, you know that it is a little more involved than what is posted on the official website guide. There are some pre-requisites that the system needs to be set up with, in order to make sure the service installs and runs successfully. Let us take a look at the steps involved in setting up a Kong instance from the ground up. This guide is valid for RHEL 7, PostgreSQL 11, and Kong 0.14.1. We will set up Kong on a VMware virtual machine. If you are using another hypervisor, the steps for hardware configurations may differ slightly. First, let us take a look at the pre-requisite steps that need to be addressed before we begin our work.- RHEL 7 VM with minimum/base packages
- A valid Subscription with RedHat with appropriate entitlements
- Static IP configuration set up
- /etc/hosts configured for name resolution
- /etc/hostname set up with the fully qualified domain name
- SSH Keys copied on your local workstation (optional)
- Nameserver set up
- firewalld service disabled
- Yum enabled
- Non-root user set up for sudo access (optional)
- VMware tools package installed
Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => Installing Kong: A First Day Guide
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[post_content] => We've all heard that containers and cloud technologies help us avoid lock-ins. While most of that is true, you could be unintentionally locking yourself to a particular technology or framework, if you are not careful. Let's talk about some important aspects to consider, when you are evaluating a cloud or a container platform. 1. Compile a list the features you want a platform to have, based on your requirements Your needs to consume a hybrid cloud architecture may be different from other organizations. The vision of having more flexibility and agility may be the same, but your workloads are different. It is important to know the in-depth architecture of the applications and workloads you want to live in the cloud or container environment. 2. Support You may have thousands of commercial-off-the-shelf applications, and hundreds of custom built ones. Some application vendors may not support containerizing their applications. There could be regulatory or other limitations that prevent certain legacy applications from being supported on containers. Depending upon how critical and integral such applications are to your business, you may want to consider newer offerings that make the full use of cloud and containerization benefits like microservices architecture. 3. Licensing and Exit costs Platform cost is always a factor, no matter the size of the organization. One of the native benefits that containerization provides, is the ability to control costs – assuming your applications are architected accordingly. For example, a cloud-native application can be scaled in to public cloud for just the webtier when necessary (assuming microservices architecture) rather than spinning up large capacity VMs on demand in the cloud for monolithic applications. Another important consideration is around how the platforms are priced. A platform that prices based on worker nodes may be more feasible for an organization that plans on developing hundreds or thousands of microservices, and making them run efficiently on worker nodes. A platform priced based on the number of applications containerized may be more feasible for monolithic applications. You will need to take in to account how your organization plans to scale the containerizing of applications, and what the application architectures will be like. Although you will be making a decision based on long term usage of the platform, it is always a good idea to see what the exit costs will be once you decide to move away from the chosen platform. As an exercise, see if you can figure out what changes would need to be made to the application architecture, the deployment architecture, resource skill sets, and more, if you were to move away from the chosen platform. That can then serve as a yardstick for how locked-in you might be, upon choosing a particular solution. There will always be some level of customization effort an lock-in, no matter which solution you choose – but the idea would be to minimize the monetary and non-monetary exit costs. 4. Detailed architecture knowledge about your applications Nobody wants to make major technology adoption decisions based on hearsay. It is critical to know the detailed application architectures, as that will guide you towards choosing the right solution. If the bulk of your application workloads are legacy monolithic applications, the primary tangible benefit obtained by containerizing them will be horizontal scaling. This is assuming the application vendors will support the containerized versions, the applications will allow multiple instances running within the same sub-net, the application can be used with a load balancer, and so on. To leverage the self-healing and other native capabilities offered by containers, the cloud-native applications developed in a microservices architecture would be an ideal workload. But in the real-world, there is always going to be a mix of legacy and newer workloads. For highly regulated industries like healthcare, insurance, banking, and others – legacy applications may form the biggest chunk of their workloads. If you have the time, it would be ideal to do a cost-benefit analysis for legacy workloads to compare the benefits offered by horizontal scalability and the like, before choosing to move forward with containerization. 5. Implementing vendor agnostic tools, and processes, refactoring if necessary Choosing a platform is just one piece of this complex puzzle involving the rollout of new technologies. There are critical tasks pre- and post- containerization, that also need to be accounted for. For example, how easy or difficult will it be to refactor the existing application for a chosen platform? How easy or difficult will it be to monitor the performance of the chosen platform? How easy or difficult will it be to integrate the chosen platform with other toolsets? Will there be changes needed to your existing processes or toolsets, so they can work effectively with the chosen platform? The end goal for most organizations is to have an easy transition path into Cloud and Container platforms – and to use these platforms as effective tools for their IT teams and business in general. This vision can be best achieved by having a vendor agnostic strategy, and avoiding vendor lock-ins wherever possible. Associates at Keyva have helped multiple organizations assess their application readiness and move them in to containerized and cloud environments. Keyva also helps with the pre- and post- containerization steps. These include things like refactoring existing applications, adding a wrapper over current applications so they can be consumed easily by DevOps processes, and more. If you'd like to have us review your environment and provide suggestions on what might work for you, please contact us at [email protected] Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => Avoid Cloud & Container Vendor Lock-In
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[post_date] => 2019-01-15 21:26:42
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[post_content] => You might've heard this before – configuration management database (CMDB) should be the single source of truth. But what does that mean? And how can you achieve it? With all the different third party applications in your environment, you might think it could be a gargantuan effort to consolidate all the data in to the CMDB. It may be a decent amount of work, but the reality is that it is easier than what most would anticipate. By taking the 3 step approach below, you can come close to configuration management database nirvana – a current and accurate CMDB: Step 1: Develop, and agree on a configuration management database schema, and the necessary mappings This step requires the IT Service Management (ITSM) teams, and the various business units to agree on a configuration management database schema and how it will be organized. ITSM teams would create data mappings – to help map data captured from various software components in the environment, into the specified fields within the CMDB schema. This would also include activities around customization of various fields within the CMDB forms, and customizations around API access. Step 2: Integrate and Automate Integrate the configuration management database with all sources of data as per the identified data mappings. This can be done by leveraging existing integrations, or by creating new ones. The population of data within the CMDB can be done as part of an extract-transfer-load process (retrospectively), or as part of the creation of a CI using automation (prospectively). The process of CMDB population is a multi-step process, whereby data is captured via one of the discovery tools and automatically updated within the CMDB. Automation of CI population also helps create relationships between CIs and Change tickets or Incident tickets, thereby making the review process for Change Advisory Boards much easier. Step 3: Optimize and Reconcile Once the data is in the configuration management database, it is important to make sure it is accurate. Given that many different sources of data may compete for the same target field within the CMDB, weights can be assigned to each source to improve accuracy. For example, the asset tag of a device may have a higher weightage when that data is coming from a discovery tool, but the CPU information captured within a configuration management system can be trusted more than any other source. Furthermore, the data captured from all the various sources should be put in staging datasets. It is up to the administrators of the system, to define rule sets and reconciliation rules that will automatically filter the required data in to production data set for consumption. The above may seem like oversimplification of the tasks required to have a fully functional CMDB, but many organizations have successfully adopted a version of this breakdown. It is highly likely that the most time will be spent upfront during the configuration management database schema and data mapping exercise. By investing time and effort towards having an accurate CMDB, organizations can effectively understand the various configurations and their relationships within in the environment, and thereby easily track and manage them. Associates at Keyva have been helping customers set up and optimize their ITSM and CMDB systems for the past two decades. We've also helped organizations develop integrations between configuration management database and third party application software so as to accelerate the population of the CMDB, and to keep it current and accurate. If you'd like to have us review your environment and provide suggestions on what might work for you, please contact us at [email protected] Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => 3 Steps to Achieving Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Nirvana
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[post_name] => 3-steps-to-achieve-configuration-management-database-cmdb-nirvana
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[post_date] => 2019-01-11 16:54:38
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[post_content] => If you have tried setting up a DevOps pipeline to achieve continuous deployment, and ran into configuration drift issues - you will know the pains quite well. A consistent and uniform configuration is a prerequisite to any automation. If the automated workflow finds that the target configuration is not as anticipated, it will either take the exception route, or revert to notification for manual intervention. What is configuration drift? When a given system configuration or an application configuration changes from the "blessed" or "vetted" state, to another state, it is called configuration drift. For example, if the IT team provides web server instance with a preset configuration file, and as part of the application deployment process or application customization process, that configuration is changed – that constitutes a configuration drift. Similar drifts can occur at the OS level, for packages or commercial software. Why does it matter? It is important to mitigate and remediate any configuration drifts because without it, the environment will become unmanageable, especially as you scale. Consider the web server example above, when there is an application outage in your production environment. As part of finding the root cause of failure, you will now also need to walk back the steps of every configuration changed from the original version, to rule out any issues caused because of those changes. This can cause time and efforts to be deployed towards tangential activities. With consistent deployment automation, you can confidently evaluate the issues plaguing the core application, given all other things to be constant. Another reason that reducing or preventing configuration drift is paramount, is to make sure that any additional deployments on the base tier can be automated. In the above example, it is much easier to automate application deployment on a web server delivered as PaaS, than deploying the same application on a web server that might've been customized, or drifted from its desired state. How to mitigate or prevent configuration drift? There are many ways you can address the resolution of configuration drift. The common factor for all scenarios is to make sure the deployments are automated. Firstly, you'd have to define what constitutes a configuration drift. For example, if you are providing your customers with IaaS machines, would adding a new printer constitute configuration drift? Or would that be classified under allowed customizations, that have no material effect on your service delivery? The rules of configuration will need to be defined. Secondly, you'd want to automate the deployments of your builds and configurations. This could mean using an orchestration framework to deploy the desired service through a self-service catalog, or another automated mechanism. Thirdly, you'd want to make sure that the release and update process for various infrastructure and application components flows through a source control management (SCM) system. Any and all deployments should pick up the latest version of the configs from SCM. And by deploying a systems configuration management solution, you can now check the configuration states of your target systems against the latest versions of those configurations in SCM. There are many other steps you can take to mitigate configuration drift, depending upon the severity of the drift and the penalty you pay for not addressing it. Keyva has helped several organizations address the common challenge of preventing configuration drift. There are several processes and tools an organization can use to address their customized needs for preventing configuration drifts in their infrastructure and applications. If you'd like to have us review your environment and provide suggestions on what might work for you, please contact us at [email protected] Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => Configuration Drift : The Bane of Continuous Deployments
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[post_content] => Over the last few years, we've all been exposed to different meanings of the word "Cloud". Similarly, other terms like "Application Development" and "Application Modernization" are sometimes used nebulously as well. Application Development could mean a few different things – it could be creating an integration between two existing software modules using APIs, or it could be mobile application development, or it could mean developing a standalone computer program that serves a business purpose, or it could mean all of the above. No one term is more correct than the other. It depends on what is relevant for you, and how you define an application. Application Modernization could also cover a few things – it could mean recoding an application in a new programming language, or moving the application from one platform to another, or moving it to the public cloud, or making the application architecture more agile and breaking it down in to microservices framework. If the objective is to have your legacy application leverage all the benefits available from a distributed Cloud architecture, the process to make the necessary modifications to that application's architecture or implementation is referred to as Application Modernization. "Cloud-Native" is the term used to describe the characteristics of born-in-the-cloud applications. These applications are built to be used in a distributed fashion, are services aware, resilient, and scalable. But the largest proportion of applications in many industries are still run within legacy on-premises environments. Short of doing a rip-and-replace for those functional applications, there is a need to transform and modernize these legacy applications to fit the new Cloud architectures. Here are some things to consider reviewing, as part of the application modernization process:- Application Architecture (dependency libraries, database, web tier, front end, queues, etc.)
- Coding Language
- Any dependencies on the platform hosting the application
- Decoupling of components or functions
- Resiliency / Error Handling
- Storage for Stateful Apps
- Scalability
- Metrics or Logging endpoints
Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => Application Modernization: A Path to Cloud-Native
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[post_content] => By Anuj Tuli, Chief Technology Officer Here are the steps to installing Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform from scratch, for your lab or dev environments. We will walk through setting up the OC cluster with 1 master and 1 node, but you can set up as many nodes as you'd like. Since we are not setting up the master nodes in HA configuration, we'd recommend this setup be limited to your lab environments. This guide is valid for RHEL 7, and OSE 3.5. We will set up Openshift Container Platform on VMware virtual machines. If you are using KVM or another hypervisor, the steps for hardware configurations may differ slightly. First, let us take a look at the pre-requisite steps that need to be addressed before we begin our work. This applies to both VMs (Master VM and Node VM):- RHEL 7 VM with minimum/base packages
- A valid Subscription with RedHat with appropriate entitlements
- Static IP configuration set up
- /etc/hosts configured for name resolution on both servers
- SSH Keys copied on both servers (optional)
- Nameservers set up
- firewalld service disabled
- Yum enabled
- Non-root user set up for sudo access (optional)
- VMware tools package installed
- Both VMs set up with 40 GB of additional attached storage (i.e. separate volumes). It is an important step, as this volume will be used when setting up Docker storage.
Prepare and Install Packages (on Master and Nodes)
Since we set up RHEL with minimal packages, we would need to enable all the needed rpms. First register with subscription manager using your Red Hat profile credentials.subscription-manager register subscription-manager refresh subscription-manager attach –-auto subscription-manager repos –-list subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-rh-common-beta-rpms subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-rpms subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-source-rpms subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-rh-common-source-rpms subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-rh-common-debug-rpms subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-optional-source-rpms subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-extras-rpmsTo enable OpenShift rpms, you will need to find the associated Pool ID and attach it separately.
subscription-manager list --available --allFind the pool ID associated with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and run:
subscription-manager attach --pool <Pool ID>You will now be able to enable the associated repos.
subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-ose-3.5-rpms subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-openstack-10-rpmsOptionally, if you want to set up OC Cluster in HA configuration:
subscription-manager repos --enable="rhel-ha-for-rhel-7-server-rpms"Finish setting up other utils:
yum repolist yum -y update yum install wget git net-tools bind-utils iptables-services bridge-utils bash-completion yum install gcc python-virtualenv yum install atomic-openshift-utils
Set up dnsmasq (on Master and Nodes)
When using OpenShift SaaS offerings, the service provider takes care of setting up DNS and routing. But since we are setting up the cluster from the ground up, we need to set up these components manually. We will be using dnsmasq for our lab.yum -y install dnsmasq bind-utilsWe will now modify the /etc/dnsmasq.conf configuration file. It is recommended that you back up the existing conf file before modification, in case you need to revert to it later. Modify the /etc/dnsmasq.conf file: On the Master, add or modify the #address and the #resolv-file sections as follows:
address=/<subdomain.domain.com>/<master IP> resolv-file=/<path>/<custom-filename>On each Node(s), add or modify the #address and the #resolv-file sections as follows:
address=/<subdomain.domain.com>/<nodeIP> resolv-file=/<path>/<custom-filename>This /<path>/<custom-filename> is where we will list our nameserver (in most cases, your subnet gateway) IP address. On the Master, create the file
vi <path>/<custom-filename>And add the linenameserver <IP>On each Node(s), create the filevi <path>/<custom-filename>And add the linenameserver <IP>We will also need to update the /etc/resolv.conf file and modify the existing nameserver entry to be a loopback address. On the Master and Node(s), open the /etc/resolv.conf file and modify the nameserver entrynameserver 127.0.0.1Note that if you reboot your VMs, you may need to update the nameserver entry in this file again. On both the Master and the Node(s), we have disabled the firewall service already (as a pre-requisite). We will now enable the dnsmasq service:
systemctl enable dnsmasq && systemctl start dnsmasqIn order to make sure the dnsmasq service is working correctly, you can try to ping the <subdomain>.<domain> address you defined in the /etc/dnsmasq.conf file under the address section.
ping <subdomain>.<domain>If you run this command on the Master, it should return the IP address of your Master server. You could also add another custom subdomain in front (any string), and it should return the same IP address. For example -ping <my_sub>.<subdomain>.<domain>should return the IP of the Master server as well.
Configuring Docker (on Master and Nodes)
Our next step is to set up Docker on these machines.yum -y install docker-1.12.6We will be modifying the /etc/sysconfig/docker-storage-setup file. It is recommended that you back up the existing file before modification. But first, we need to find out what our volume is named. If you recall, we had set up additional 40 GB volumes on our machines for use with Docker storage. The output of fdisk –l will give you the name of your additional disk volume. In my case, it was /dev/sdb. We will use the sdb name in our docker-storage-setup file. Open /etc/sysconfig/docker-storage-setup through your favorite editor, comment all existing lines, and add the following entries:
DEVS=sdb VG=docker-vgSave and close the file. We will disable cluster locking configuration for LVM
lvmconf --disable-clusterAnd then run our Docker storage setup
docker-storage-setupYou can verify the setup using the command
lvsIt will show you the attributes and sizes associated with the various volumes We can now start the Docker service
systemctl enable docker && systemctl start docker
Openshift install (on Master)
We can now finally get started with the OpenShift install steps.yum -y install atomic-openshift-docker-excluder atomic-openshift-excluder atomic-openshift-utils bridge-utils bind-utils git iptables-services net-tools wgetOnce we have all the packages ready to go, we run
atomic-openshift-installer installThe setup asks a number of questions. After selecting a user that you'd like to enable for SSH access, you will be asked to select a variant for the install. We will select option [1] for OpenShift Container Platform, which is also the default. You will be asked to enter the hostname or IP of your Master node, and choose whether the host will be RPM based or container based. The installer will then provide a brief summary of the information entered, and will prompt for additional hosts. We will select y and this time we will enter the hostname or IP of our Node server. You can go through configuring additional Node servers in this section. For the 'New Default Subdomain', you can configure the . information as you have defined it under the /etc/dnsmasq.conf file. This portion can be used later for external routing. If you have any http or https proxies, you can configure them on the next screen. The installer then shows a summary of all the information captured, and what the configuration would look like. Once you confirm all the shown configurations, the installer kicks off the setup. It can take a while for the install to complete. Once the installation has completed successfully, you can verify the running services using the following command
systemctl status | grep openshiftThe output of this command will list the services running on both master and node(s). If you run the same command on the node(s), it will only show the services running on that node. You can also run some sample OC commands on the Master to make sure all looks good
oc get pods oc get projects oc get nodesThat should do it! You have now set up a single node OpenShift cluster in your lab environment. The process of creating users depends upon which Identity Provider you would like to have set up with OpenShift. You can access the OpenShift console via https://<Master_IP_or_FQDN>:8443/console If you have any questions about the steps documented here, would like more information on the installation procedure, or have any feedback or requests, please let us know at [email protected]. About the Author [table id=3 /] [post_title] => Red Hat OpenShift : Day 1 Install Guide [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => red-hat-openshift-day-1-install-guide [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-05-28 17:41:50 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-05-28 17:41:50 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://keyvatech.com/?p=1090 [menu_order] => 43 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) ) [post_count] => 8 [current_post] => -1 [before_loop] => 1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1149 [post_author] => 7 [post_date] => 2019-02-19 19:48:42 [post_date_gmt] => 2019-02-19 19:48:42 [post_content] => This technical guide will walk you through the installations of Ansible v2.4.2.0, an open source configuration management and deployment tool, and Ansible Tower (web layer for Ansible) v3.4.1 on a RHEL 7 virtual machine. Ansible Tower is a RedHat supported and paid version of AWX, which is open source. We will first enable the required repos:
sudo subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-ansible-2.6-rpms subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-desktop-optional-rpmsYou can install the latest version of ansible using Yum:
yum install ansible(Since we will be installing Ansible Tower on this same machine, it is recommended to use the Yum method to install Ansible). -OR- You can build the RPM package by downloading the latest version of Ansible code from Git. If choosing this method, first we will need to get all the pre-requisite libraries ready (some of these are optional):
yum update yum install python-dev python-pip wget yum install git yum update -y nss curl libcurl yum install rpm-build yum -y install pythonDownload the latest code, and build:
mkdir ansible cd ansible/ git clone https://github.com/ansible/ansible.git systemctl stop firewalld systemctl disable firewalld cd ./ansible/ make rpm rpm -Uvh ./rpm-build/ansible-*.noarch.rpmOnce installed, you can view and modify the default Ansible hosts file at /etc/ansible/hosts You can also verify successful installation using the command:
ansible –-versionNow, we can go ahead and set up Ansible Tower on this machine. We will be using the integrated installation, which installs the GUI, the REST API, and the database – all on the same machine:
mkdir ansible-tower cd ansible-tower/ wget https://releases.ansible.com/ansible-tower/setup-bundle/ansible-tower-setup-bundle-3.4.1-1.el7.tar.gz tar xvzf ansible-tower-setup-bundle-3.4.1-1.el7.tar.gz cd ansible-tower-setup-bundle-3.4.1-1.el7/Tower connects to the PostgreSQL database using password authentication. We will need to create a md5 hash to configure Tower to talk with the database. Replace <CUSTOM-DB-PASSWORD> with a password of your choosing:
python -c 'from hashlib import md5; print("md5" + md5("<CUSTOM-DB-PASSWORD>" + "awx").hexdigest())'Make a note of the hash key generated from this command. We will use it for our next step. We have to now update the inventory file (located within ansible-tower-setup-bundle-3.4.1-1.el7 directory) with the passwords for the database, the hash key generated above, and a custom password of our choosing for rabbit_mq. Find the following lines and update them accordingly. First, for setting the admin password for the consoleadmin_password='AdminPassword'Next, set the password for database connectivity. Please note, this password should be the same as what you used to replace <CUSTOM-DB-PASSWORD> during the hash key generation step above. Also, we will paste the copied hash key, and set it for the hashed password line
pg_password='password' pg_hashed_password='md5f58b4d5d85dbde46651335d78bb56b8c'And finally, choose a custom password for rabbit_mq
rabbitmq_password='password'We are now ready to run the setup script
./setup.shOnce all the steps are completed successfully, you can verify the Tower installation by going to the URL
https://<MACHINE-IP-OR-FQDN>:443You can use the admin credentials (username: admin, password: admin password as defined in the inventory file) to log in and access the console. You can request a free Ansible Tower license for an evaluation environment of up to 10 nodes, or can purchase a RedHat subscription for larger environments, and some additional logging, management and support features. If you have any questions about the steps documented here, would like more information on the installation procedure, or have any feedback or requests, please let us know at [email protected].
Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ [post_title] => Installation Guide: Ansible & Ansible Tower - Day 1
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Installation Guide: Ansible & Ansible Tower – Day 1
This technical guide will walk you through the installations of Ansible v2.4.2.0, an open source configuration management and deployment tool, and Ansible Tower (web layer for Ansible) v3.4.1 on a ...
What is Microservices Architecture?
You may have heard the term Microservices when talking about applications, and some cases even when talking about underlying infrastructure. If you’ve worked with any OOPS language, you must be ...
Installing Kong: A First Day Guide
If you’ve tried to install Kong from scratch, you know that it is a little more involved than what is posted on the official website guide. There are some pre-requisites ...
Avoid Cloud & Container Vendor Lock-In
We’ve all heard that containers and cloud technologies help us avoid lock-ins. While most of that is true, you could be unintentionally locking yourself to a particular technology or framework, ...
3 Steps to Achieving Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Nirvana
You might’ve heard this before – configuration management database (CMDB) should be the single source of truth. But what does that mean? And how can you achieve it? With all ...
Configuration Drift : The Bane of Continuous Deployments
If you have tried setting up a DevOps pipeline to achieve continuous deployment, and ran into configuration drift issues – you will know the pains quite well. A consistent and ...
Application Modernization: A Path to Cloud-Native
Over the last few years, we’ve all been exposed to different meanings of the word “Cloud”. Similarly, other terms like “Application Development” and “Application Modernization” are sometimes used nebulously as ...
Red Hat OpenShift : Day 1 Install Guide
By Anuj Tuli, Chief Technology Officer Here are the steps to installing Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform from scratch, for your lab or dev environments. We will walk through setting ...