Chapter 29. Best practices for automation controller

Automation controller supports playbooks stored directly on the server. Therefore, you must store your playbooks, roles, and any associated details in source control. This way you have an audit trail describing when and why you changed the rules that are automating your infrastructure. Additionally, it permits sharing of playbooks with other parts of your infrastructure or team.

This section describes the recommended file and directory structure for Ansible projects used with Automation controller and execution environments. Ansible projects typically include playbooks, inventory files, variable files, and custom modules or plugins. A well-organized file and directory structure enhances maintainability, collaboration, and scalability of Ansible projects.

To ensure reliable and consistent automation, follow these best practices for managing your content:

If you have an external source of truth for your infrastructure, whether it is a cloud provider or a local CMDB, it is best to define an inventory sync process and use the support for dynamic inventory (including cloud inventory sources). This ensures your inventory is always up to date.

Variables associated with hosts and groups in an inventory can be managed in several ways in automation controller.

Keep variable data with the hosts and groups definitions (see the inventory editor), rather than using group_vars/ and host_vars/. If you use dynamic inventory sources, automation controller can synchronize such variables with the database while the Overwrite Variables option is not set.

Use the "callback" feature to permit newly booting instances to request configuration for auto-scaling scenarios or provisioning integration.

Set "forks" on a job template to larger values to increase parallelism of execution runs.

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) are development practices that require developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day.

Each integration can then be verified by an automated build and automated tests. CI/CD is a method to deliver applications to customers by introducing automation into the stages of app development.

The main concepts attributed to CI/CD are continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. Automation controller can be integrated with CI/CD systems to enable automated provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and other IT tasks as part of the CI/CD pipeline.

For a Continuous Integration system, such as Jenkins, to spawn a job, it must make a curl request to a job template. The credentials to the job template must not require prompting for any particular passwords. For configuration and use instructions, see Installation in the Ansible documentation.