Divingbell Ansible Framework

Ansible playbooks to achieve tasks for making bare metal changes for Divingbell target use cases.

Problem description

Divingbell uses DaemonSets and complex shell scripting to make bare metal changes. This raises 2 problems: - Increasing number of DaemonSets on each host with increasing Divingbell usecases - Reinventing the wheel by writing complex shell scripting logic to make bare metal changes.

Impacted components

The following Airship components will be impacted by this solution:

  1. Divingbell: Introducing Ansible framework to make bare metal changes

Proposed change

This spec intends to introduce Ansible framework within Divingbell which is much simpler to make any bare metal configuration changes as compared to existing approach of writing complex shell scripting to achieve the same functionality.

Adding playbook

Ansible playbooks should be written for making any configuration changes on the host.

Existing shell script logic for making bare metal changes lives under divingbell/templates/bin, wherever applicable these should be replaced by newly written Ansible playbooks as described in the sections below. Ansible playbooks would be part of the Divingbell image.

A separate directory structure needs to be created for adding the playbooks. Each Divingbell config can be a separate role within the playbook structure.

- playbooks/
    - roles/
         - systcl/
         - limits/
    - group_vars
         - all
    - master.yml

Files under group_vars should be loaded as a Kubernetes ConfigMap or Secret inside the container. Existing entries in values.yaml for Divingbell should be used for populating the entries in the file under group_vars.

This PS Initial commit for Ansible framework should be used as a reference PS for implementing the Ansibile framework.

Ansible Host

With Divingbell DaemonSet running on each host mounted at hostPath, hosts should be defined as given below within the master.yml.

hosts: all
connection: chroot

Ansible chroot plugin should be used for making host level changes. Ansible chroot plugin_

Divingbell Image

Dockerfile should be created containing the below steps:

  • Pull base image
  • Install Ansible
  • Define working directory
  • Copy the playbooks to the working directory

Divingbell DaemonSets

All the Divingbell DaemonSets that follow declarative and idempotent models should be replaced with a single DaemonSet. This DaemonSet will be responsible for populating required entries in group_vars as volumeMounts. Ansible command to run the playbook should be invoked from within the DaemonSet spec.

The Ansible command to run the playbook should be invoked from within the DaemonSet spec.

The Divingbell DaemonSet for exec module should be left out from this framework and it should keep functioning as a separate DaemonSet.

Ansible Rollback

Rollback should be achieved via the update_site action i.e. if a playbook introduces a bad change into the environment then the recovery path would be to correct the change in the playbooks and run update_site with new changes.

Security impact

None - No new security impacts are introduced with this design.

Performance impact

As this design reduces the number of DaemonSets being used within Divingbell, it will be an improvement in performance.

Implementation

This implementation should start off as a separate entity and not make parallel changes by removing the existing functonality.

New Divingbell usecases can be first targetted with the Ansible framework while existing framework can co-exist with the new framework.

Dependencies

Adds new dependency - Ansible framework.

References