Tag: Ansible

Automating Node Exporter and VMagent Deployment with Ansible

Introduction

Keeping your infrastructure healthy means keeping a close eye on it—and that is where monitoring tools like Node Exporter and VictoriaMetrics VMagent come in. They are great at collecting and shipping system metrics from your servers, but here is the catch: installing and configuring them manually across dozens of machines is tedious, messy, and frankly, a recipe for inconsistency. That is where automation saves the day. In this guide, we will walk through how to use Ansible to deploy Node Exporter and VMagent cleanly and reliably, following best practices that are ready for real-world production environments. Continue reading “Automating Node Exporter and VMagent Deployment with Ansible”

All Redis Setup Under 7 Minutes!

Redis is a popular open-source in-memory database that supports multiple data structures like strings, hashes, lists, and sets. But similar to other tools, we can scale standalone Redis to a particular extent, but not beyond that. That’s why we have a cluster mode setup in which we can scale Redis nodes horizontally and then distribute data among those nodes.

Generally, we categorize the Redis setup into three different types:

  • Standalone
  • Leader-Follower (Replication)
  • Leader-Leader(Sharding)

Standalone Setup

In a Standalone setup, the complexity is minimal, but we cannot scale the solution if the data increases. Also, the fail-over and high availability will not be supported inside it.

Continue reading “All Redis Setup Under 7 Minutes!”

Understanding the Ansible Helm Diff Plugin for Kubernetes Deployments

Introduction

Helm is one of the important tools for managing resources for Kubernetes. When we talk about large-scale helm manageability, there is a requirement for another tool through which we can manage helm deployments. There can be multiple options through which we can manage Helm but Ansible gives more flexibility to manage Helm deployments. Not only flexibility, but Ansible consists of many features and core Kubernetes modules through which we can manage Helm deployments.

Having a large variety of Kubernetes core modules, Ansible is not only for Helm deployments but also helps to manage Kubernetes and can be used to manipulate other kinds of commands. Continue reading “Understanding the Ansible Helm Diff Plugin for Kubernetes Deployments”

Ansible Directory Structure Explained: Defaults vs Vars (Best Practices & Examples)

Distinguishing between defaults and variables is an important design decision when developing an Ansible role. Defaults serve as your public interface, providing suitable values ​​that users can modify according to their needs. Variables, on the other hand, represent your internal framework, containing constants that must remain constant for the role to function effectively.  Striking the right balance not only makes your role user-friendly, but also ensures that it’s flexible and clearly states what can be customized. A key point is this: use default values ​​for values ​​that users can change, and reserve variables for the role’s internal needs.

Continue reading “Ansible Directory Structure Explained: Defaults vs Vars (Best Practices & Examples)”

Speeding up Ansible Execution Part 2

MITOGEN


In the previous post, we discussed various ways to reduce the ansible-playbook execution time, those changes were mostly made in the ansible config file, by adding or adjusting certain parameters in the file. But as you may have noticed that those methods were not that effective in certain cases, while using those methods we have to be very cautious about the result as they may affect ansible performance in one way or the other.


Generally, for the slower ansible execution, the main culprit is the way ansible is executed on the hosts. It creates multiple SSH connections and does not fully utilize the available resources. To tackle this problem, MITOGEN came to rescue !!!

Mitogen is a distributed programming library for Python. The Mitogen extension is a set of plug-ins for Ansible that enable it to operate via Mitogen, vastly improving its performance and enhancing its functional capability.

We all know about the strategies in ansible – linear, free & debug., the mitogen is just defined in the strategy column of the config file, so it is just a strategy, we are not making any other changes in the config file of the ansible so it is not affecting any other parameter, it is just the way, playbooks will be executed on the hosts.

Now coming to the mitogen installation part, we just have to download this package at a particular location and make some changes in the ansible config file as shown below,

[defaults]

strategy_plugins = /path/to/mitogen/ansible_mitogen/plugins/strategystrategy = mitogen_linear

we have to define the path where we have stored our mitogen files, and mention the strategy as “mitogen_linear”, under the default section of the config file, and we are good to go.

Now, after the Mitogen installation part, when we run our playbook, we will notice a reasonable reduction in the execution time,

Mitogen is fast because of the following reasons,

  • One connection is created per target and system logs aren’t spammed with repeated authentication events.
  • A single network roundtrip is used to execute a step whose code already exists in RAM on the target.
  • Processes are aggressively reused, avoiding the cost of invoking Python and recompiling imports, saving 300-800 ms for every playbook step.
  • Code is cached in the RAM, which further increases the speed.
  • Generally, ansible repeatedly rewrites and extracts ZIP files to temporary directories in the target hosts, mitogen also reduces these rewrites.

      All the above-mentioned features make the ansible to run faster.

      Mitogen is another extension for ansible that provides a decrease in its execution time and it is very easy to use, I think MITOGEN is very underrated and one of its kind, and we should definitely give it a try.

      I hope I have explained everything well, any suggestion/queries are highly appreciated.


Thanks !!!

Source:

https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html