mkosi VS Ansible

I work with a free and open-source software community called Fedora Project. I had the opportunity to moderate the talk of one of the maintainers of the Systemd suite during the annual contributor conference, Flock To Fedora 2023 where he talked about a tool named Mkosi.

For testing i prefer systemd-nspawn containers with mkosi. A neat tool for running your other fav. distro in a terminal. Works like a charm and integrates nicely in your system. Eg. logs and systemd services or CI testing.

- https://github.com/systemd/mkosi

- man:systemd-nspawn(1)

- man:machinectl(1)

you're gonna have to build this on an x86 pc. sudo dnf install arch-install-scripts bubblewrap gdisk qemu-user-static rsync systemd-container python3 -m pip install --user git+https://github.com/systemd/mkosi.git git clone https://github.com/leifliddy/asahi-fedora-usb.git cd asahi-fedora-usb

There's also mkosi: https://github.com/systemd/mkosi. This one outputs an iso or similar image file and supports many base distributions.

[1] https://github.com/systemd/mkosi/issues/376

System's mkosi is worth checking out too: https://github.com/systemd/mkosi I don't think it generates docker/OCI images directly, but it definitely can generate a tarball of the final image contents and then crane of a similar tool could package it up into an appropriate image. For just docker usage it's probably overkill, the main advantage would be it can build other image types like adding a kernel and init to be a fully bootable iso of VM image.

Constellation ensures that all K8s nodes run on AMD-based Confidential VMs (CVMs). CVMs are strongly isolated from the host and remain encrypted in memory at runtime. Constellation also ensures that all nodes run the same minimal mkosi-based node image.

At first glance I thought your project is a frontend for mkosi but then I saw that you support non-systemd targets too. Mentioning it here because it may be relevant to other users/developers.

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 ↗