In my last post I covered the setup and hardening of Hashicorp’s Vault platform, in this post I’ll be looking at getting to grips with REST API and the Token authentication method. Tokens are core to the Vault authentication system, the platform is at it’s heart designed to be interacted with programmatically by external systems over the API and the UI exists only to make the platform less bewildering for . . .
Recently I’ve been working with Hashicorp’s Vault, a product that I’d played with a little in the past but never really gotten stuck in to. Vault provides a centralised Secret Management platform, including some really cool features like IDAM, cross platform support, dynamic secret management and a fully fledged enterprise offering. It also boasts some pretty fantastic out of the box back-end integrations, Hashicorp’s own Consul is a big favourite, . . .
Recently we looked at integrating Ansible Tower with Hashicorp Vault, but I thought it would be worth taking a look at another popular Secrets management system, Azure Key Vault. Whilst the solution isn’t exactly the same using Azure Key Vault and Tower was my first time trying to integrate Ansible with a centralised Secrets repository, so let’s take a look at how to achieve the integration as it’s not very . . .
Following my look at integrating Ansible Tower with Windows, I thought I’d take a look at another common requirement that needs some slight tweaking (though not nearly to the extent of Windows), networking devices, specifically Cisco devices running IOS, ASA and NX-OS platforms. Networking – It’s Built In Unlike the additional layers of configuration that comes with Windows, the use of Cisco platforms is native to Ansible, however some steps . . .
Since the release of Ansible 1.7, way back in the forgotten era of 2014, Ansible can connect to Windows (2008 and higher) using remote PowerShell over that most finicky of mechanisms, WinRM. Red Hat are quick to sell the unilateral management capabilities of Ansible (which do exist), but under the hood we see a uniquely Windows problem. Ansible was built for SSH initially and because Microsoft as ever adopt a . . .
Outside of the tools, technology and other bells and whistles of the DevOps mindset are the concepts of CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery). Getting to grips with this mentality and the tools used to implement it can be a challenge but not one that needs to take a lifetime, especially not if you’ve been observing some sensible behaviour out of the gate. A multitude of tools claim to have . . .
If you’re anything like me, you probably spent years hearing about the wonders of containerisation and didn’t know where to start. Docker, Kubernetes, Swarm, ECS, App Services and Containers are thrown around as almost interchangeable terms and to the uninitiated it’s just another wall of terms that means nothing (spoiler: the terms aren’t interchangeable and Docker isn’t the only game in town, it’s just the most popular form of container). . . .
UPDATE: At the time I wrote this the Netbox Collection was still pretty immature, it isn’t anymore. If you’re trying to do a simple task then you probably just want to go and install the Netbox Collection from Ansible Galaxy and use the native Modules. You can find the Collection here! Ansible Tower and Netbox are two of my favourite tools, and their integration is seemingly painless on the surface . . .
I’m starting a blog about DevOps tools and technology, aimed at people who can’t work out how this stuff works and find the documentation and concepts impenetrable. After a while of teaching myself I’m starting to realise that it isn’t just me that’s struggling to figure stuff out and there’s a lot of people that don’t want to admit that they don’t understand things. I’m not sure how this is . . .