Mezzanine VS Ansible

I've recently started playing around with Mezzanine, a django-based CMS. I recently just managed to configure Fabric to get it uploading to my host, webfaction.com, as its a bit more involved automatically creating the website on the shared hosting, and I wanted to automate that process.

To give you a better idea of how Python-based applications work on our servers, we’ll show you how to install the Django framework-powered Mezzanine CMS on our platform via SSH.

There is also Mezzanine / Cartridge which is kinda like WordPress / WooCommerce in the PHP world, it’s primarily for a website that may have a shop added to it. Be aware that this is also somewhat legacy, last time I checked it was kinda in maintenance mode and the variant system for products was super limited.

Mezzanine / Cartridge is similar to WooCommerce in the WordPress world, if you are wanting to add a shop to an existing site then this is a decent option. The problem with it is that the main dev on it went off to work for Google so it’s more or less in maintenance mode and the product variant system is very basic.

mezzanine is probably a simpler one. it recently just got revived and their 5.0 release is now in rc1 state. There's also django-fiber which seems to be quite simple (not much code, one app to add only)

Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool that simplifies application deployment, cloud provisioning, and configuration management across diverse environments. It uses a declarative language to describe the desired state of the system, and then takes the necessary actions to achieve that state. Ansible has become incredibly popular due to its simplicity, agentless architecture, and extensive community support. Document: ansible.com, ansible basics

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.