Ansible Consulting - ONSITE

Project Identification

a. Project Purpose and Objective
To obtain expert Ansible best practices advice and guidance on the topic areas
listed in the In Scope section. Services should not exceed 80 hours and will
include a daily summary emailed to State of Maine team members involved. A
final report documenting all relevant observations and advice is required in MS
Word format. This project needs to be completed within two months.
b. Background
The State's Linux system administration team has been working with Red Hat
Ansible automation platform for over a year and has had significant success
expanding the scope of automation in our environment. This has resulted in
measurable productivity improvements in our environment.
However, lacking the benefit of long-term experience with Ansible, we're
concerned that our current coding structures, practices and configuration may not
align with industry best practices and standards.
Before significant further investment, we want to get feedback and guidance on our
current practices and configuration to ensure workability, stability, reliability, and
minimize technical debt.

Required Skills:

1. Services Required:

• Remote attendance at multiple sessions with Linux team staff to review our current
  configuration and discuss options, and pros and cons of various alternate
  approaches.
• Document recommendations with rationale for each topic area identified in the “In
  Scope” section below and sent to the Linux team in a mutually agreed-upon report
  format.

2. Deliverables

• Microsoft Word document(s) of recommendations with rationale for each topic area
  listed below in the “In Scope” section (Code Deployment Strategy, Best Practices
  and Ansible Tower documents)
  3. In Scope:

Desired Skills:

1. Provide recommendations on an effective code deployment strategy for our use cases
(currently including configuration management, patch automation, service start/stop,
agent management)

• How to version code and deploy based on versions
• How to deploy code in a staggered fashion (Dev, Pre-Prod, Prod)
• Advice on storing roles in git repos (installing with git tags for versions), or using
  local Ansible automation hub to store roles as collections for versions

2. Provide best practices advice on the following:

• Playbook/code standards
• Working with variables, group/host variables
• Credential management
• Encryption/vault management
• Role based access
• Setting up job templates and workflows
• Managing inventory, inventory groups
• Lifecycle management
• Maintaining CIS lockdown compliance over time
• Using and creating custom execution environments
• Routine maintenance and administration of Red Hat Ansible Automation
  Platform
• Ansible upgrade process with single node, how does that change if we deploy
  additional control nodes/execution environments?
• Writing and managing custom modules

3. Provide recommendations on controlling Red Hat Ansible Tower using its REST API

• When/why to use the REST API