11 Mar

Using Docker Swarm? You gonna love Ansible 2.8!

Ansible 2..8 introduces huge update for Docker Swarm modules

The Ansible is kind of an icon of automation platform. Owned by RedHat but available as a free product on the public license. Developed both by RedHat employees and the community. Docker itself is an icon of containerization. If you use containers you know that automation is the key to simplify management of dockerized infrastructure. In Ansible 2.x many modules covering the docker operations has been introduced, but Docker Swarm was not really covered. However, it is going to change soon! There is a huge update coming with Ansible 2.8 release!

Lately, I started missing some features in Ansible that will allow me to perform some operations on Docker Swarm clusters. And I try to avoid using the command or shell modules as much as possible – running CLI commands on a remote host is like asking for troubles. I decided to fill this gap by myself and as a result, I can say I am now the Ansible community developer, author, and maintainer of a few modules – docker_swarm_facts, docker_node_facts, docker_host_facts, docker_node; and co-author of docker_swarm and the ansible.docker.swarm library.

In next posts, I wanna show you how those modules work. However, if you are looking forward using them I strongly advise you to give them a try now and report any bugs you find so we can fix them before Ansible 2.8 release. You can find them in the devel branch of Ansible repository.

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