Partnering on open source: Google and Ansible engineers on managing GCP infrastructure
Tom Melendez
Senior Software Engineer, Google
It's time for the third chapter in the Partnering on open source series. This time around, we cover some of the work we’ve done with Ansible, a popular open source IT automation engine, and how to use it to provision, manage and orchestrate Google Cloud Platform (GCP) resources.
Ansible, by Red Hat, is a simple automation language that can perfectly describe an IT application infrastructure on GCP including virtual machines, disks, network load-balancers, firewall rules and more. In this series, I'll walk you through my former life as a DevOps engineer at a satellite space imaging company. You'll get a glimpse into how I used Ansible to update satellites in orbit along with other critical infrastructure that serve imagery to interested viewers around the globe.
In this first video, we set the stage and talk about Ansible in general, before diving into hands-on walkthroughs in subsequent episodes.
Upcoming videos demonstrate how to use Ansible and GCP to:
- Apply a camera-settings hotfix to a satellite orbiting Earth by spinning up a Google Compute Engine instance, testing the latest satellite image build and pushing the settings to the satellite.
- Provision and manage GCP's advanced networking features like globally available load-balancers with L7 routing to serve satellite ground images on a public website.
- Create a set of networks, routes and firewall rules with security rules to help isolate and protect the various systems involved in the imagery processing pipeline. The raw images may contain sensitive data that must be appropriately screened and scrubbed before being added to the public image repository and network security is critical.
The series wraps up with a demonstration of how to extend Ansible's capabilities by writing custom modules. The videos in this series make use of custom and publicly available modules for GCP.
Join us on YouTube to watch the upcoming videos or go back and watch the other videos on the series. You can also follow Google Cloud on YouTube, or @GoogleCloud on Twitter to find out when new videos are published. And stay tuned for more blog posts and videos about work we’re doing with open-source providers like Puppet, Chef, Cloud Foundry, Red Hat, SaltStack and others.
