Overview

MiaRec uses Ansible IT automation engine to deploy its software components on Linux system. This guide provides step-by-step instructions for both initial deployment as well as update of MiaRec software.

What is Ansible?

Ansible is an automation tool for provisioning, application deployment, and configuration management.

Ansible uses playbooks written in the YAML language for orchestration. For more information, see Ansible - Intro to Playbooks.

Compared with other server configuration management DevOps tools, Ansible doesn’t require agents to be installed on the managed servers. Instead, Ansible manages the IT infrastructure by using SSH protocol to communicate the managed resources. This dramatically simplifies the configuration of managed systems for two reasons—no process daemons need to run on the remote servers to communicate with a central controller and IT administrators aren’t required to manage or maintain agents on each managed node.

Ansible can communicate with multiple managed nodes at the same time. This allows to easily deploy various software components, like database, web server, recorder on multiple dedicated servers using a single command.

Comparing to manual installation commands, Ansible allows to build a completely reproducible server configuration. It is a good practice to test Ansible playbooks towards the staging environment and after verification apply the same configuration to the production environment.

Installation workflow

The following diagram shows the general workflow of an MiaRec installation using Ansible.

In the next chapters, each of these steps is described in details.

This guide refers to the following types of hosts:

• Controller host, which runs the Ansible playbook
• Target hosts, where Ansible installs MiaRec software components.

In simple scenarios, like "all-in-one" configuration when all MiaRec software components are deployed on a single host, the same host can be used for both Controller and Target roles, i.e. the Ansible playbook could be run to deploy MiaRec locally. The following diagram demonstrate a difference between these use cases: remote controller and local controller.

In more complex scenarios, like the deployment of MiaRec software components on multiple hosts, the Ansible playbook should be executed from a remote host. The following diagram shows how the remote controller host automatically deploys MiaRec on multiple servers.