MAAS (Metal as a Service) gives you the ability to provision physical and virtual servers via an easy to use web console. You can use MAAS to deploy Ubuntu with ease, and it even supports PXE boot in order to provide you with a full deployment solution. In this video, you’ll get an overview of MAAS and how to set it up.
Thanks to Linode for sponsoring this tutorial. Check them out and claim $100 in free credit toward your new account.
Although there’s no such thing as a “perfect” deployment image, including some sane defaults into your images and templates can save you a lot of work down the road, and also give you the opportunity to include more secure defaults. In this episode, we’ll discuss deployment image defaults as well as some recent news.
cloud-init is an awesome technology that can be used to customize Linux images for deployment, that lets you do all kinds of neat things such as automatically creating users, installing packages, resetting SSH keys, and more. However, it’s often shrouded in mystery. In this video, I’ll walk you through using it to create a user, set the hostname, and install some packages.
Ansible is an incredible configuration management and provisioning utility that enables you to automate all the things. In this series, you’ll learn everything you need to know in order to use Ansible for your day-to-day administration duties. In video #9, we split our inventory file into groups, and look at how to run tasks on nodes based on their group.
