Achieving Zero Downtime Rolling Updates with Ansible

Ansible (http://www.ansible.com/) is an open source automation system with many features that are useful to achieving continuous deployment. If you haven't heard about Ansible, this would be a great time to learn more. In 2013, it was the 5th largest project on GitHub for number of contributors!

The main thing that is unique about Ansible is the focus on agentless management, so in order to use it, no daemons need to be installed on the remote systems. This means problems of "managing the management" are greatly reduced. It also features a "batteries included" philosophy, where it contains about 200 modules in core for accessing all kinds of IT services -- whether locally installed or cloud based.

In this talk, Michael DeHaan (creator of Ansible) will showcase easy methods around achieving zero downtime rolling updates with Ansible -- how it works with physical and cloud-based load balancers, how to configure update batch sizes, how to model variance between computing environments, and so on.

In addition, we'll show how Ansible can be wired into CI systems, like Jenkins, to automatically run tests in stage environments when builds complete, and also how to integrate tests into Ansible playbook deployments so that only successfully configured servers are brought back into the load balancer. We will also show how to use features like the "unarchive" and "git" modules to pull content from both build servers and source control for installation on remote systems.

Sign-in & networking at 6:30, talks at 7.

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BIO

Michael DeHaan is the creator of Ansible (http://www.ansible.com/), Cobbler (http://www.cobblerd.org/), and co-creator of Func (https://fedorahosted.org/func/) (a progenitor to Ansible.) Michael is currently serving as CTO of Ansible, Inc (based in Durham, NC) and is in town for AnsibleFest (http://www.eventbrite.com/e/ansiblefest-nyc-2014-tickets-10952628607?aff=eorg) on 5/20.

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SPONSOR

This event is hosted by HuffPost Code (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huffpost-code/), a new vertical from the HuffPost Labs team. HuffPost Code is dedicated to data, development and design content. Interested in writing for Code? Email labs@huffingtonpost.com . Follow Code on Twitter (https://twitter.com/HuffPostCode) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/huffpostcode) for updates.

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ANNOUNCEMENTS

CDNYC is looking for speakers to present in June and July. If you have any ideas for topics you'd be interested in learning about or know anybody who would be interested in presenting, please send me an e-mail at dan@cdnyc.co .