Copying files from host to K8s pod via Ansible

September 30, 2019

There weren’t a lot of resources out there to share how to execute commands or copy files using Ansible and the kubectl Connection plugin. To help, I decided to document how to use the plugin. At least an example.

Usage is fairly easy. Top copy a file from your Ansible machine to the K8s pod you’ll need to have your ~/.kube/config file setup. Follow kubectl instructions for that part (it can differ depending on your cloud).

In this example, I add the K8s pod to inventory, then copy a file to the K8s pod. I added a step that allows you to see what the file contains if you use -vvv in the Ansible command

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---

- hosts: localhost

tasks:

- name: Token | Add k8s pod to inventory

add_host:

name: node-0-0

ansible_connection: kubectl

ansible_kubectl_namespace: 2071296ed6284f5f801f8dd52c9c7779

- name: Token | Deploy testfile to K8s Pod

copy:

src: /home/eanderson/testfile.txt

dest: /tmp/testfile.txt

delegate_to: node-0-0

- name: Token | Get testfile from K8s Pod

command: cat /tmp/testfile.txt

delegate_to: node-0-0

There are additional parameters, which are listed here: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/plugins/connection/kubectl.html

ansible, automation, kubernetes, plugin

Ansible, Kubernetes

Automate Everything

March 20, 2016

Eric Anderson

Ok, almost automate everything. I do recognize that this far into DevOps there are some things you can’t quite automate. But for the most part you can stick to these few rules. If your situation matches any of these, you could probably automate it with a script.

The same actions are performed often, more than 3 times.
You want to outsource advanced actions to a tier 1 team.
You want to allow developers or non-technical people perform the actions.
You want a way to make sure the same actions are done whenever something is ran
Source control has a huge benefit, I script just about everything, just so I can upload it to source control and roll back a script if there’s a bad change.

Some languages that are really common in DevOps land include Bash, Python, Powershell (my Windows friends), and Ruby, however, I have seen DevOpsers use Java, Perl, Go, and many other languages. Over 6 years and 3 companies, I’ve only seen Bash, Python, Powershell, and Ruby used within those companies.

automation, bash, powershell, python, ruby, script, scripting, source

DevOps

DevOps Really…..

March 1, 2016

Eric Anderson

What is DevOps?

DevOps is not one thing, its a plethora of ideas, and practices that have revolutionized Operations and the Release Process. It’s a culture change. DevOps is using development practices and applying them to operations. Then using those methods to automate everything. It starts to join both Operations and Development together, consider it as a hybrid, I mean it is DevOps, it’s the joining of Development and Operations. DevOps was created to empower developers to quickly integrate and build environments to test code, and allows the operations teams to quickly deploy and monitor applications just as fast as the developers and QA teams can approve it, thus leading to Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. DevOps teams that I have started tend to do well with another great practice called Scrum, which are just as important to operations as it is to development, if you don’t believe me try it for a month, then see how effective your team starts becoming. As you may have noticed many of these things are part of Agile practices, if you aren’t familiar hopefully reading and following this blog you will be. DevOps and Agile go hand in hand. DevOps helps reach the goals of Agile effectively, also much easier. You don’t want Operations to be a blocker….that looks bad…wait…it looks really bad.

Some extremely popular concepts come into play here.

Scrum
Operations Early
Infrastructure as Code
Automate Everything
Test Driven Development for Ops (CircleCI, TravisCI, etc.)
Integrated Operations
Pets vs. Cattle

Over the next few weeks I will cover all of these, and hopefully more. There’s just way too much to type up in one blog post, and all of it is important (I mean there’s entire books written about this stuff, there’s even series of books written about these practices).