Overview of CI/CD Pipelines

• Basic Pipeline
  
• In each Enviroment such as System Test or Performance Test or Load Test environment, expectation is
  • Ensure the application is deployed and running
  • We execute the Automated Tests and showcase the results
• Relevance of Configuration Management:
  • This comes into play when your application is deployed on Physical or virtual machines

Configuration Management (CM)

• This is used to configure applications or setups on servers.
• Where is it used
  • deploying applications on servers
  • network automation
• How does this work ?
  
• Models in Configuration Managment
  • PUSH BASED CM:
    • Examples:
      • Ansible
      • Salt
  • PULL BASED CM
    • Examples
      • Chef
      • Puppet
  • HYBRID (Support Both)
    • Examples:
      • Powershell DSC
• PUSH BASED CM (Design Considerations):
  • In this case CM Server needs to maintain list of all node details like (name, ipaddress etc)
  • It also needs credentials
    
• PULL BASED CM
  • In this agent needs to be installed on node
  • No credentials are required
    

Ansible

• Ansible is simple to use,
• Ansible works in two ways
  • directly execute commands
  • write yaml files (playbooks) to define what you want.
• Ansible is an opensource software developed in python Refer Here
• Ansible is also widely used in Network and Datacenter Automations
• In the world of Ansible
  • CMServer => Ansible control node
  • list of node and ip details => inventory
  • Ansible uses python to work
    

Understanding Ansible Workflow

• Goal: Deploy nginx on a server
• Manual activities:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx -y

• Ansible’s approach (Declarative):
• I will create a playbook

---
- name: install nginx
  hosts: all
  become: yes
  tasks:
    - name: install and update nginx
      apt:
        name: nginx
        update_cache: yes
        state: present   

Goals

1. Try doing some manual deployments
2. Learn YAML
3. Automate manual deployments by writing playbooks
4. Write Ansible Playbooks effeciently