I would like to introduce the Apigee Private Cloud Accelerator. The Apigee Private Cloud Accelerator is a community contribution. This community contribution can help you install, configure, and manage your Apigee Private Cloud platform deployments using Ansible. The Apigee Private Cloud Accelerator assumes that you selected a supported operating system and that you have a server available for use as an Ansible controller. The Apigee Private Cloud Accelerator is implemented as a collection of custom Ansible roles that are pulled together into playbooks. The playbooks are constructed around the basic premise that we need compliance with operating system prerequisites, an installation of the Apigee Bootstrap, and an installation of Apigee components.
Ansible works with defined inventories of host servers. Ansible inventories provide for the aggregation of those servers into groups. Groups are used as an aggregation vehicle by which a set of servers can be defined as a unit. Groups can be nested within other groups. The ability to define groups in this way has been used with the Apigee platform semantics to designate which server group will fulfill a specific Apigee component role. We then constructed playbooks that work to each Apigee component role. Commented inventory templates are provided that simplify the process of providing server specifics without breaking the Apigee Private Cloud platform semantics used in the playbooks.
The installation of the Apigee Private Cloud requires that we set a number of attributes that are specific to the target installation. The installation of Apigee Private Cloud receives those attributes in files. We use a central custom properties file to hold common and reasonable default values for these attributes. The custom properties file and the Ansible inventory together provide enough information to generate response files. These generated response files are then used to install and configure the Apigee Private Cloud.
The information used to generate response files is sufficient to satisfy a number of concerns that provide post-installation utility. These concerns include but are not limited to adding a second data center, LDAP replication, Postgres Master / Standby replication, scaling Routers & Message Processors, scaling a Cassandra ring, or simply troubleshooting an issue.
Feel free to use the Apigee Private Cloud Accelerator and let us know what you think in the comments below.
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