Ansible
Ansible is an open source automation platform. It can help you with configuration management, application deployment and task automation. It can also do IT orchestration, where you have to run tasks in sequence and create a chain of events which must happen on several different servers or devices.
Unlike Puppet or Chef, it doesn’t use an agent on the remote host. Instead Ansible uses SSH which is assumed to be installed on all the systems you want to manage. It’s written in Python which needs to be installed on the remote host. This means that you don’t have to setup a client server environment before using Ansible, you can just run it from any of your machines and from the clients point of view there is no knowledge of any Ansible server.
WSO2 product installation
The WSO2 installation manual defines the steps:
- prerequisite software installed. i.e. Oracle Java
- dedicated for WSO2 product’s user and group,
- RDBMS database used for data,
- setup and configuration for
- standalone
- distributed or
- clustered installation,
- secure the installation by secure vault.
This all installation steps should be made by the system administrator.
Automated installation – WSO2 and Ansible
The WSO2 installation can be automated. The installation can be made using Ansible scripts. Some of the scripts have to be customized for the required setup (like cluster) and some can be used as common (presented below). Ansible gives us a possibility to install the product on many servers.
WSO2 user and group
The sample script creates the WSO2 group when doesn’t exist. The same with the user.
Installing WSO2 product using WSO2 WUM
The sample script installs the newest release of a WSO2 product using WSO2 Update Manager. The product is added to WUM and downloaded if is not operated. In other case is updated to the newest release.
Customizing the product
The customization is made by processing and copying the customized WSO2 configuration files to the WSO2 product’s location. During the process, the variables defined in the templates are changed to the values.
Database installation
This sample shows how to create database, load data tables definitions and create the user with privileges.
Secure vault
The script shows how to secure the WSO2 product by encrypting the passwords in configuration files. Script calls the WSO2’s command ciphertool.sh.
Conclusion
Ansible is a great tool to automate the WSO2 installation process. Yenlo sees many opportunities to use Ansible for this purpose. This blog is just an example. Most of the scripts are common for the all WSO2 products (like presented in the article) or can be adapted for the required installation. We have Ansible roles (scripts) available for all WSO2 products to implement the products easily. Please contact us to see how we can help you with this efficiently.
If you have any questions about this blogpost contact us via the comments section of this blog. View also our WSO2 Tutorials, webinars or white papers for more technical information. Need support? We do deliver WSO2 Product Support, WSO2 Development Support, WSO2 Operational Support and WSO2 Training Programs.
