anventory

Anventory

Experimental Ansible inventory management project

This is very WIP, nothing functional at the moment.

Introduciton

The idea behind this project is to create an Ansible inventory management system being a bit more flexible and easier to manage at medium and possibly larger scale.

Current approach is to create a permanently running service which offers a REST API and hopefully eventually a web ui talking to this API.

Design goals

Some of it's goals are:

• Ability to fully render host_vars into the _meta.host_vars structure without letting Ansible resolve the variable precedence.
• Easier introspection of where a certain value of a host_var comes from (which group, ...)
• Better nested groups:
  • Add all hosts of child groups also to the hosts list of a parent group
  • Add all child groups of child groups also to che children of a parent group
• Ability to use from both a standalone Ansible setup and an AWX/Tower based setup
• All changes should be track-able. This is a serious downside of AWX/Tower at this moment.

Stuff to figure out/brainstorming

• Authentication: API keys/user management/rbac: what are the options?
• Use framework for API? (github.com/gorilla/mux ?)
• UI design - not my strongest point
• Ansible-Vault-like functionality? Options/possibilities to evaluate:
  • Full secret management in Anventory - most likely not desirable
  • Hashicorp Vault integration (how?)
  • Keep secrets in classic group_vars and host_vars files in a repository, and just reference them from Anventory. This creates a split brain scenario.
• How to track changes:
  • Keep history in database
    • Min: tricky to visualize
    • Min: pretty much creating own versioning system
  • Store all data in text-files on disk that can be committed in SC
    • -> Evaluate https://github.com/src-d/go-git as library
    • Min: tricky to keep stuff consistent, a bit creating our own database
    • Min: Possible performance impacts?
    • Min: hard for concurrent access
    • Plus: all changes can be tracked
    • Plus: versioning is done for us
    • Toughts:
      • define human editable on-disk text-format? YAML/JSON/TOML/...?
      • possible to work with post-commit hooks?