v0.7.4-beta

AP-ALB v0.7.4-beta is a pre-release. Both have some minor additions over the V0.6.x series and YAML code refactoring and changes on documentation. Ah, and now is much faster for hosts already deployed 🚀

As said in the v0.7.0-alpha changelog, this release was mostly based on private tests. A new version, v0.8.x will start soon with the features beyond optimizations and new minor features, in special functionality related to clustering (and yes,things can get very challenging to implement if we don't even have features like shared IPs for Keepalived or be require extra disks to be formatted for DBRD!)

New minor features

• Shared options on documentation now explicitly cites variables that are reused by several ALB Components
  • Some old options only accepted single values, but the new standard is much more flexible.
• HAProxy Stats Page makes better use of Shared options (refs #16) and is better documented
• ALB/UFW is now more flexible (refs #14)
  • Most of the old functionality should still work, since already was based on what is now the Shared options.

Optimization

• ALB is now becoming faster for subsequent runs! (refs MVP ALB Facts #13)
  • It will check for facts it will deploy at ``/etc/ansible/facts.d/` and skip tests for several components
  • Note: all files on /etc/ansible/facts.d/ (the ones deployed by ALB) will be recreated again from scratch if already does not exist. They work as some sort of fact caching

Features removed or not enabled as default

• Task group common exist, but is not enabled by default.
  • Set alb_manange_common: yes explicitly
  • Note: since common was doing things that just need to setup once, this should not affect old hosts even without changes.
• Task group DevTools, an optimal non default component, was removed
  • As v0.7.x, it was just installing netstat, htop, multitail and (only if HAProxy was enabled, hatop).
  • The documentation cites how to use these cli tools with ALB, but for automated installation we suggest one repository created because of ALB, at https://github.com/fititnt/infrastructure-as-code-ad-hoc-ansible
• Variables starting with alb_superuser_* (that where never really documented) where replaced for more flexible detailed on Shared options.

Potential issues new with v0.7.4-beta

• ALB skiping deploy of changes on some component (refs MVP ALB Facts #13)
  • If you have issues with specific ALB components not deploying a change, you can either delete the respective file on the host (for ALB/UFW would be /etc/ansible/facts.d/alb_ufw.fact) or do some very minimal change (like naming something different) and this may alone trigger a deploy
  • Note: this type of issue is more likely to happens if you are making changes to what ALB does not manange was YAML option
    • So it means mostly who is changing ALB core (like the developers) or who is creating custom templates. But we believe the huge speed improvement makes sense. Maybe we explicity release some way to skip the some caches.
• HAProxy Status page based on older YAML configurations is likely require additional changes
  • This maybe not even break deployment with older configurations (with features that where not well documented), but what was defined with alb_superuser_* would now be done using the alb_auth_users from Shared Options.