Infrastructure Automation: Optimize Your IT Environment

Rundeck

28. October 2024

Standardization in the data center - Automate Standard Operating…

Event-Driven Ansible

18. January 2024

Event-Driven Ansible is here and it opens a whole new world of possibilites for working with Ansible. This article gives an introduction to it and shows a minimal example.

In all areas of life, there are a lot of issues we are not aware of. To measure these problems, we use the so-called fulfillment rate. For example: with a fulfillment rate of 90%, a heart beat would stop every 85 seconds, and an average A4 page of text would contain 30 typos. A fulfillment rate of 99.9% (which seems a lot) still means 22,000 wrong bank bookings per hour, and a total of 32,000 missed heart beats per year. The answer is automation and standardization! These approaches help solve problems we are often not aware of.

Configuration Management across Different Networks with AWX

11. July 2023

At the Chemnitz Linux Days 2023, Ottavia Balducci, IT Consultant at ATIX, presented the advantages of AWX. AWX is a tool that can be used to configure hosts with Ansible. It is therefore particularly popular with larger organizations. AWX is open source, fully customisable, has a web UI, REST API, RBAC, CI/CD ... There are many reasons for working with AWX.

Configuring Hosts using Ansible

5. July 2023

You can use Ansible to configure managed hosts within orcharhino. For our up-to-date documentation, see Configuring Hosts using Ansible. Ansible is an automation engine and configuration management tool. It works without client and daemon and solely relies on Python and SSH. Ansible consists of a control node, for example a notebook, a workstation, or a server and managed nodes, that is the hosts in its inventory. You can use Ansible to configure hosts similar to Puppet and Salt.

AWX and GitLab Webhooks

25. January 2023

Tools like AWX and Ansible Automation Platform have become essential in large organizations to manage a large amount of Ansible projects. They provide the ability to pull Ansible code from multiple sources, schedule jobs, distribute credentials and permissions for different users in the organization, and a lot more. We recommend managing Ansible code in a version control system, specifically Git. There are several platforms for functions beyond mere version control. In this article, GitLab plays a central role.

Ansible Best Practices

9. January 2023

Ansible is a tool that automates configuration management through code written in YAML. It is extremely popular, partly thanks to the fact that it works without clients and daemons: all it needs is Python and an SSH connection!

Deploying a Kubernetes Cluster with orcharhino

2. December 2022

This blog post is about an orcharhino feature called application-centric deployment (ACD), and describes the process of deploying a Kubernetes cluster with orcharhino. It allows administrators to create hosts based on application templates, and makes it easier to run multiple instances/versions of a complex application.

Ansible Automation Platform

25. May 2022

Ansible is known to be one of the most widely used automation tools. This is certainly also due to the relatively simple setup and use. Especially in very large environments, i.e. with a large number of users, a pure CLI setup quickly reaches its limits: Multi-tenancy, credential management, scheduling are just some of the points that require a very close look.

Automated Windows Patches with Ansible

16. February 2022

As a specialist for Linux patch management, we are often asked whether we are also familiar with Windows patch management and whether we can provide an automated solution for this. The answer is pretty simple, YES we can. We have already built and implemented fully automated Windows patch management with Ansible for several customers.

orcharhino and Sophos – a malware trail search

11. February 2022

The use of anti-virus and security software is a prerequisite in most infrastructure scenarios. This makes it all the more important to adapt them to the respective usage scenario. orcharhino as the central hub in the computing cluster is of particular importance.

The Future of Ansible

31. March 2021

The introduction of Collections is not the only recent major innovation in Ansible. Until version 2.8, Ansible was offered as one large package. This included a variety of modules developed and maintained by the Ansible community. The introduction of Collections happened as part of the release of version 2.9: a format for easy packaging and distribution of Ansible content. Collections significantly improved the possibilities for extensions as well as maintenance. The current major version is Ansible 3.0.0. ansible-base is not installed with it, but has become a dependency.