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Ansible
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy and maintain. Automate everything from code deployment to network configuration to cloud management, in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems. https://docs.ansible.com.
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InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
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terraform
Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.
Working on your infrastructure setups and testing your automation script can be tedious if you don’t have a proper test environment that enables a fast iteration loop. The best when automating your server provisioning with Ansible scripts is to be able to set up servers a local server step by step then play all the steps from the ground up and make sure everything goes as planned. Once the local and iterative design phase is complete you will be ready to create an automated pipeline to set up an actual production environment.
With a small project spread across several articles, I want to show you what I consider the minimum requirement for a small self-hosted project. I invite you to check my Github repository for other articles and more details about the whole project.
First, install Vagrant. Simply go to the main page and download the product for your platform. Once Vagrant is installed you can need a hypervisor, the most popular is VirtualBox because it can run on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. With both requirements installed (Vagrant + VirtualBox) you can get started spawning a Linux Debian ****virtual machine and start experimenting.
Ansible is a simple automation tool that can orchestrate pretty much any task you would need to configure and maintain your infrastructure. Ansible work best when you are dealing with actual machines (servers or virtual machines), I would not recommend using it to provision Cloud infrastructure as it lacks a state management capabilities you can find in other tools such as Terraform. But here we will be dealing with configuring Linux servers so ansible works best here.