Ansible Multiple Environment Best Practices

Ansible Multiple Environment

Handling multiple infrastructure environments with Ansible is easily done by targeting the environment tag that is included in the mandatory AWS Tags. See AWS Tagging Best Practices.

Avoid mixing environments mistakes

Have switches, configurations redundancies and different keys for each environment to reduce the possibility of applying changes to the wrong client or environment.

Applying the PRE environment configuration to the PRO environment will be a terrible error.

To prevent errors from happening:

Environment Tag

Use the tag tag_environment_ENV as a selector in playbooks, for example:

  - hosts: tag_os_ubuntu:&tag_environment_ENV
    become: yes
    roles:
      - { role: linux/pam_limits, tags: [ 'pam_limits'] }
      - { role: linux/hosts_file, tags: [ 'hosts_file'] }
      - { role: linux/host_name, tags: [ 'host_name'] }
    tags:
      - common
  ...

Multiple Ansible Playbooks

Have a different Ansible playbook for each environment, e.g.:

• ditwl_des.yml
• ditwl_pre.yml
• ditwl_pro.yml

Unique Ansible Private Keys

Have a different SSH Key files for each combination of environment and user that has to have SSH access either by console or using Ansible.

The key is set using the ANSIBLE_PRIVATE_KEY_FILE environment variable. Each USER should have its own private key for each environment ENV.

E.g.: ditwl_pk_USER_ENV_infradmin.pem