Ansible VS community.hashi_vault

Ansible v2.16

Ansible is a tool used to help manage software automation processes, configuration management across machines, deployment as well as remote execution of commands and scripts. In sports, Ansible operates as the coach of your team by providing strategies (playbooks), and actions, and ensuring the smooth execution of tasks across your infrastructure, just like a coach guides and directs players (Servers)during a game.

They support for-if from python, too: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.1.x/templates/#loop-f... but I haven't tried the "recursive" keyword to know if ansible supports that. I say "ansible supports that" because they don't just drop jinja2 into ansible and call it a draw, they have a bunch of custom execution integrations: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.16.3/lib/ansible/...

To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck

In this article's context, it is simply a tool that provides a declarative way to automate your machine/OS to configure the development machine as you want (install package, modify the configuration, etc). Examples of these tools are Ansible, Puppet, etc.

Now we're getting more tangential, but for years, Ansible releases were named for Van Halen songs (see old Changelog here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.8.4/CHANGELOG.md)

In the lab to follow, we'll quickly provision a 3-node kubeadm cluster (1 master, 2 workers) on the cloud provider of your choice using an automation stack comprised of OpenTofu and Ansible, then deploy Rook Ceph using the official Helm charts and confirm that we are now able to successfully create CSI volume snapshots from PVCs by reusing the MinIO example from our last article.

Ansible-Core ↗

My way of doing private SSL (not necessarily the easiest):

* own CA, to be distributed to all systems via Ansible playbook or Dockerfile directives

* Hashicorp Vault with enabled PKI engine

* Ansible Hashivault module [1]

* Ansible role & playbook to tie it all together

* CI enviroment for automated deployment of SSL certs to target systems

Works flawlessly once set up, including restart/reload of affected services. Might do a writeup on my personal blog at some point.

[1] https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.hashi_vault

community.hashi_vault 5.0.0 has been released. See the collection changelog for details.

community.hashi_vault version 4.2.1 has been released with updated documentation for the vault_kv2_write module. There are no functional changes.

community.hashi_vault version 4.2.0 [changelog] has been released with a new KVv2 write module and a warning/deprecation for duplicated term string option use in the hashi_vault lookup.

The community.hashi_vault collection has released version 4.1.0 with a new vault_list module and lookup from a new contributor! There are also some upcoming deprecation announcements for hvac and ansible-core support.

community.hashi_vault version 4.0.0 has been released, with previously announced breaking changes to some default values, and improvements to module documentation with attributes that describe the use of action groups and check mode support.

community.hashi_vault version 3.2.0 has been released with support for the azure auth method, thanks to new contributor @jchenship. This release also includes retries on HTTP 412 and a bugfix affecting requests>=2.28.0.

community.hashi_vault has released version 3.1.0, announcing a change to a default value that will take place in 4.0.0.

The community.hashi_vault collection is looking for feedback about support for end-of-life Python versions going forward. Join the discussion.

community.hashi_vault version 3.0.0 has been released, dropping support for Ansible 2.9 and ansible-base 2.10, as well as removing some deprecated features.