Description

Builds AS3 declarations based on inputs from variable files provided. Enables the ability to abstract complexities using AS3 and Ansible.

High level workflow

• User updates environment variables in vars/main.yaml
• User provides app variables in app-inputs directory
• create_app.yaml creates AS3 declaration segments based on templates within j2 directory.
• push_config.yaml merges AS3 segements into single declarations and pushes across all BIG-IPs in the vars/main.yaml file

Example Environment Diagram

Setup

1. Edit the hosts file.

   1. In the examples hosts file there are 3 BIG-IPs (Zone1, Zone2, aws). Update these to match the infrastructure of your orginization.
   2. Make sure to update the localhost device to use the correct python env interpreter.

2. Update vars/main.yaml to reference the hosts you created along with the Tenants required for your applications.

   datacenters:
     - aws
     - Zone1
     - Zone2
   tenants:
     - Tenant1
     - Tenant2
   f5_user: admin
   f5_password: admin

   1. Ensure that the password is encrypted with vault when used outside of this demo.

      ansible-vault encrypt_string admin --ask-vault-pass --name f5_password
      

3. Create var files that represent your application ADC parameters within the app-inputs directory. There are 3 example var files provided within the repo.

4. Create the AS3 declaration fragments using the create_app.yaml playbook.

   ansible-playbook -i hosts create_app.yaml -e "@app-inputs/App1.yaml"
   

   1. You will notice that this playbook will also create the apps folder and then tree out each Zone/Tenant combination.

    ├── apps
    │   ├── Zone1
    │   │   ├── Tenant1
    │   │   │   └── App1.json
    │   │   └── Tenant2
    │   │       └── App3.json
    │   ├── Zone2
    │   │   ├── Tenant1
    │   │   │   ├── App1.json
    │   │   │   └── App2.json
    │   │   └── Tenant2
    │   └── aws
    │       ├── Tenant1
    │       │   ├── App1.json
    │       │   └── App2.json
    │       └── Tenant2
    │           └── App3.json
   

5. This is hopefully a temporary step. As of right now one of the modules within push_config.yaml requires a full path and does not work with relative. Please update the dest line as below to match your environment. /Users/test/Desktop/sc/ansible-as3-app-files/

  - name: Group all Application Files
    assemble:
        ....
      dest: /Users/test/Desktop/sc/ansible-as3-app-files/tmp/{{item[0]}}-{{item[1]}}_combined.yaml

1. Run the push_config.yaml playbook to actually push the AS3 declarations to your BIG-IPs. Remember to use --ask-vault-pass parameter if you have encrypted the passwords for your BIG-IPs.

   ansible-playbook -i hosts push_config.yaml