Octopus: Ansible Automation for Poll Application Deployment Description

Octopus is an automation project aimed at deploying a polling application across multiple machines without using containers, utilizing Ansible. This project builds on the polling application developed during the Popeye project and deploys it across 5 distinct machines, each serving a specific role within the application architecture: Redis, PostgreSQL, Poll, Worker, and Result.

General Objective

To automate the deployment of the polling application across 5 virtual instances, configuring each required service (Redis, PostgreSQL, Poll, Worker, Result) on its own machine while ensuring secure and idempotent configuration with Ansible.

Prerequisites

• Ansible 2.9 or higher.

• 5 virtual machines based on Debian 12.

• SSH access to target machines with sudo privileges.

• Environment Setup

• Ensure that Ansible is installed on your control machine and that you have SSH access to the target instances.

• Configure your production inventory file with the necessary IP addresses and authentication information.

Repository Structure

The repository contains the following:

• playbook.yml: The main Ansible playbook orchestrating the deployment. poll.tar, result.tar, worker.tar folders: Archives containing the Poll, Result, and Worker services.

• group_vars directory: Contains variables applicable to all hosts. roles directory: Contains Ansible roles defined for each service and base configuration.

Deployment

To deploy the application, execute the following commands:

Set your Ansible Vault password in a temporary file:

• echo verySecretPassword > /tmp/.vault_pass
• export ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE=/tmp/.vault_pass

Run the Ansible playbook:

• ansible-playbook -i production playbook.yml

Security

All passwords and sensitive data should be encrypted with Ansible Vault. No clear-text passwords should be found in the repository.

Ansible Roles

• base: Installs useful packages and configures instances.
• redis: Installs and configures Redis.
• postgresql: Installs PostgreSQL, creates the user and database.
• poll: Deploys and runs the Poll web client.
• worker: Deploys, builds, and runs the Java worker.
• result: Deploys and runs the Result web client.

Documentation

Link to the Doc