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Tagged with Provisioning

Multi-tier Application Deployment using Ansible and CloudForms (Video)

This article is a follow up on our previous blog post VMware provisioning example] using Ansible, where we deployed a simple virtual machine on VMware using Ansible from the CloudForms service catalog. In this week’s demonstration, we go a step further and provision a multi-tier application on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Once provisioned, the application lifecycle, as well as all day 2 operations are performed from Red Hat CloudForms.

CloudForms Service Bundle Creation using VM Provisioning and Ansible Tower Automation Job

Service catalog bundles are a really useful CloudForms feature that enable us to mix and match various existing service catalog items together to form bundles of tasks.

One of the more useful examples of a bundle is to create a new VM, and then run an Ansible Tower job template on the resulting VM to configure it with an application role. If we have an Ansible Tower server added to our CloudForms installation as an automation provider, this is quite simple. We described the procedure to configure an Ansible Tower provider in CloudForms as part of our previous series on Ansible Tower integration in CloudForms 4.1.

In this example we’ll combine two existing service catalog items. The first creates a new CentOS 7 virtual machine in a Red Hat Virtualization provider, and the second installs a simple LAMP stack using a job template defined in an Ansible Tower server, attached to CloudForms as an automation provider.

Each standalone catalog item has its own service dialog. The dialog for the VM provision service simply prompts for the service name and VM name, as follows: