Make Ansible automation OS-independent

[sync-by-unito[bot]]

The Ansible playbooks currently assume that the OS belongs to the Debian family and explicitly refer to the apt-get package manager. There are also some hardcoded paths referring to the ubuntu home dir and the tasks to install Docker on the proxy hosts are specific to the Ubuntu requirements.

This limits the possibility of using the automation in case where a different OS is required.

We should make the automation independent of the specific OS being used. This is common practice for Ansible automation scripts and there are mechanisms to help achieve this relatively easily.

┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira New Feature by Unito ┆Components: Automation ┆Fix Versions: cloudgate-automation-v1.1.0,artemis-future ┆Priority: Critical

[sync-by-unito[bot]]

➤ Jeff DiNoto commented:

This issue was discussed recently in grooming, some notes from that conversation:

• Context:  This is related to the OS on the VMs where our application elements (proxy, monitoring) are deployed
• Three customers have requested to deploy on CentOS 7
• Can we be more generic with our support:  Debian based, RH based?
• There are some tricky pieces of adding support for this with each supported OS -- may make sense to limit support to CentOS 7

The end-goal is certainly generic support, but that may not be totally necessary depending on the customer use-cases.

We should keep in mind that this automation is a helper function, it’s not the core software element. If it has requirements (OS based), that is reasonable.

Goals for this issue:

• Consider what platform independent support looks like for Ansible
• Can we take steps toward that without imparting a great deal of complexity to the project
• Basic support required to deliver is for CentOS 7

[sync-by-unito[bot]]

➤ Jeff DiNoto commented:

It’s unclear if this is necessary for Artemis or not – I went ahead and added the label anyways so that it can be discussed further. I asked recently about it and the answer was that we don’t know what the customers will need or not in this realm.

[sync-by-unito[bot]]

➤ Joao Reis commented:

Alice Lottini can we close this ticket after the containerization/zdm-util or not yet?

[sync-by-unito[bot]]

➤ Alice Lottini commented:

Not yet I’m afraid - the ZDM Utility removes the OS dependency for the control host, but the playbooks still expect Ubuntu on the proxy hosts. I know that there are ways to make Ansible select the appropriate package manager for the OS of the hosts it manages, but this is also about the right dependencies and the portability of the Docker module in particular.