Ansible has been an integral part of modern IT automation for many years and is a central component of orcharhino’s configuration management stack. Thanks to its ease of use, large open-source community, and extensive ecosystem, Ansible has established itself as the preferred automation tool for numerous administrators and IT teams.
However, as the complexity of modern IT landscapes increases, so do the demands on automation. Today, companies expect reproducible deployments, traceable changes, tight Git integration, and the ability to securely manage different environments. This is exactly where Ansible Director comes in.
Why Ansible Director offers real value to businesses?
Ansible Director, in combination with orcharhino, allows even better control and management of the configuration of managed systems. It offers greater flexibility in the use of Ansible, while making administration multi-tenant-capable and allowing users to verify new versions and changes in test environments using a staging mechanism before deploying them to production environments.
The new management of Ansible content and variables is now handled exclusively through orcharhino board tools, providing better transparency regarding the versions in use and an intuitive user experience.
The new lifecycles for Ansible content provide a better overview of what is being used and what the corresponding parameters are. In addition, it enables both simple and complex staging mechanisms to ensure that the stability of production environments remains a priority even when using Ansible. Through appropriate test environments, the risk of misconfigurations can be minimized for critical systems.
Ansible is now also configured and used separately for each organization, which improves its usability in multi-tenant scenarios.
Overall, using Ansible Director offers many advantages for centrally managing and controlling the configuration of managed systems via orcharhino.
Why was a new Ansible plugin developed for orcharhino?
Over time, the Ansible integration in orcharhino has only partially kept pace with our users’ needs. The main challenges here are:
- Managing Ansible Content
- Ansible collections cannot be managed as atomic units; instead, only the roles contained within the collections are imported.
- Deploying Ansible content requires manual steps on the file system of the orcharhino proxies.
- Importing content in different versions is only possible through workarounds.
- Dependency on the Ansible version of the orcharhino proxy
- Users have access only to the version of Ansible provided by orcharhino, which means that content designed for older Ansible versions often cannot be used.
- The Ansible version implicitly determines the Python version of all required Python modules.
- Global Use of Variables and Ansible Roles
- When using multiple organizations, the existing roles and specified variables are defined globally. This makes it difficult to control who can view or modify which variables.
- Even when there are differences in the roles, workarounds are necessary to clarify who is using which roles in cases where roles with similar names are deployed.
To address these challenges and meet the demands of modern workflows, we are developing Ansible Director, the Ansible integration for orcharhino that has been reimagined and rewritten from the ground up.
Features of Ansible Director
Ansible Director turns orcharhino into a powerful tool for the deterministic configuration of connected systems using Ansible. In line with orcharhino’s well-known content lifecycle, the plugin provides users with an interface for version-controlled use of Ansible. This gives users full control over the execution of Ansible for configuring their systems.
- Ansible Content
Ansible Director can explicitly manage both roles and collections. Unlike the existing integration, collections are atomic units that can be imported.
Furthermore, importing content has been significantly simplified and now requires only an API call or an action in the management UI.
Servers that support the Ansible Galaxy API as well as Git repositories can be used as sources for Ansible Content.
- Ansible Execution Environments
To eliminate the dependency on the Ansible version of the orcharhino proxy, we use Ansible Execution Environments.
These are specialized container images that contain Ansible, Ansible Content, and the corresponding dependencies. Users can define execution environments via the management UI/API and control which Ansible version should be used.
- Lifecycle Environments
Ansible Director includes a new, high-performance lifecycle management system that is decoupled from existing systems. This allows orcharhino administrators to granularly control which Ansible content and which execution environments are available to hosts.
Lifecycle environments can be promoted along a path as usual.
- Deep Git Integration
Git repositories are popular and widely used for both the development and deployment of Ansible content. Ansible Director can import Ansible content from such repositories, but it goes one step further.
Users can import and use branches, pulls (if supported by the Git server), tags, and any Git references from a repository. For “branch-like” references, Ansible Director offers the option to automatically synchronize them with the upstream repository. This ensures that changes to Git-managed content are reflected directly in orcharhino.
- Separation at the Organizational Level
Instead of defining Ansible content at a global level as before, Ansible content, associated variables, execution environments, and lifecycles are now defined at the organizational level. This allows each organization to decide independently what to use and makes it easier to customize user permissions.
What is the current status, and what are the next steps?
With the release of orcharhino 7.9, Ansible Director is available as a tech preview for the first time. This means that orcharhino users can install the plugin in their test environments and try it out for themselves. The core features are already included, but some areas are still being improved and reworked until the plugin is fully ready for use.
Our next goal is to reach a stage where the described features meet our quality standards, so that customers can begin using the plugin in their environments as soon as possible.
In addition, we are already planning further enhancements, including:
- Management of Ansible playbooks
- Advanced integrations for secret management
- Further improvements related to enterprise automation workflows
If you are interested in using Ansible Director, we recommend attending our webinar on the topic: Ansible in combination with orcharhino: Automatically configuring servers
