Managing 40+ Servers in a Data Center at a Medical University from Running in Production

Managing 40+ Servers in a Data Center at a Medical University

53 minutes Posted Jul 12, 2021 at 4:00 am.

– There’s about 40 physical servers and 200+ virtual machines / containers

– Transitioning to using Ansible over time

– A 10+ year friendship stemming from Debian and open source

– How Ansible’s role and inventory abstractions help manage a lot of VMs

– How DebOps as a name came into existence and its philosophy on being stable

– Motivation for choosing and staying with Debian

– Figuring out what new Ansible roles and playbooks to work on

– Going from a mono repo to 120+ repos and then back to a mono repo

– 67,000+ lines of YAML and 40,000+ lines of documentation

– Setting up a brand new server with Ansible and DebOps hands free in 15 minutes

– Automatically generating random passwords for services

– Not having to deal with HIPAA compliance laws and handling student emails

– Let’s Encrypt is being used on specific publicly accessible servers

– Breaking down the process of creating a new role from scratch

– Using Linux Containers in development and rolling things out to production

– Using dnsmasq in development for fully qualified domain names

– Dealing with backing everything up

– Being a maintainer of an open source project that’s extracted from work

– Best tips? Have 1 role for 1 service and find ways to connect them

– Check out DebOps, it’s on GitHub, #debops on Libera and Maciej is on Twitter

0:00

53:27

Download MP3

Share at current time

Show notes

In this episode of Running in Production, Maciej Delmanowski talks about building

out a 40+ server / 200+ VM data center with Ansible. It’s hosted on premises,

he’s been working on it all since 2007 and started using Ansible in 2013.

Maciej talks about automating everything with Ansible, being a sysadmin for

over a decade, how he picked Debian, splitting up a project into 120+ git repos

and then back to 1, writing 60k+ lines of YAML, using Linux Containers,

maintaining an open source project and more.

Topics Include

51:26 – Check out DebOps, it’s on GitHub, #debops on Libera and Maciej is on Twitter

Links

📄 References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card_bibliography

https://github.com/nickjj/ansigenome

https://github.com/nickjj/rolespec

https://linuxcontainers.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnsmasq

⚙️ Tech Stack

ansible →

python →

bash →

debian →

lets-encrypt →

open-source →

🛠 Libraries Used

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

https://rsnapshot.org/

https://libera.chat/ (we’re in #debops)

Support the Show

This episode does not have a sponsor and this podcast is a labor of love. If

you want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my

courses or suggest one to a friend.

Dive into Docker is a video course that takes you from not knowing what Docker is

to being able to confidently use Docker and Docker Compose for your own apps.

Long gone are the days of "but it works on my machine!". A bunch of follow

along labs are included.

Build a SAAS App with Flask is a video course where we build a real

world SAAS app that accepts payments, has a custom admin, includes high test

coverage and goes over how to implement and apply 50+ common web app features.

There's over 20+ hours of video.

← See all 108 episodes of Running in Production