Ansible, Azure, and Managed Disks

Many applications have a data directory, usually due to having an embedded database. For the set I work with, this includes Red Hat IdM/FreeIPA, CloudForms/ManageIQ, Ansible Tower/AWX, and OpenShift/Kubernetes. Its enough of a pattern that I have Ansible code for pairing a set of newly allocated partitions with a set of previously built virtual machines.

Continue reading

Launching Custom Image VMs on Azure With Ansible

Part of my Job is making sure our customers can run our software in Public clouds.  Recently, I was able to get CloudForms Management Engine (CFME) to deploy to Azure. Once I got it done manually, I wanted to automate the deployment, and that means Ansible.  Turns out that launching custom images from Ansible is not support int the current GA version of the Azure modules, but has been implemented upstream.

Continue reading

Generating a list of URL patterns for OpenStack services.

Last year at the Boston OpenStack summit, I presented on an Idea of using URL patterns to enforce RBAC. While this idea is on hold for the time being, a related approach is moving forward building on top of application credentials. In this approach, the set of acceptable URLs is added to the role, so it is an additional check. This is a lower barrier to entry approach.
Continue reading

OpenStack Role Assignment Inheritance for CloudForms

Operators expect to use CloudForms to perform administrative tasks. For this reason, the documentation for OpenStack states that the Keystone user must have an admin role. We found at least one case, however, where this was not sufficient. Fortunately, we have a better approach, and one that can lead to success in a wider array of deployments.

Continue reading

Java on Port 443

I’ve been working on setting up a Java based SAML provider. This means that the application needs to handle request and response over HTTPS. And, since often this is deployed in data centers where non-standard ports are blocked, it means that the HTTPS really needs to be supported on the proper port, which is 443. Here are the range of options.
Continue reading