FOCUS Virtual Machinesy
Figure 2: Cyber Range web application interacts with Ansible and OpenStack through REST API
Playbooks can declare confi gurations, but they can also orchestrate steps of any manual ordered process. Hence, playbooks: • Defi ne tasks to be performed on hosts; • Tasks are executed in the order in the playbook; • Are in YAML format.
Interaction of OpenStack with Ansible An Ansible playbook defi nes a series of tasks and confi guration on the OpenStack environment. Examples of tasks include provisioning instances of virtual machines, defi ning the IP of the virtual machines and a switch to network the virtual machines.
Case Study: Cyber range a real-life software
The Cyber Range provides customers with an extensible virtualised platform for cyber security training, modeling, simulation and advanced analytics. We off er our solution to multiple customers which include the US Department of Defense, the Singapore Cyber Security Agency (CSA/ SITSA) and the Kyushu University of Japan.
1. User clicks the start button to start an exercise (hands-on cyber security training).
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2. The Cyber Range software calls the training scenario name and user name via the REST API to Ansible Tower using a POST request. 3. Ansible Tower executes the exercise playbook tasks and provides confi guration information to OpenStack. This information includes the virtual machine images and networking information. 4. OpenStack provisions the virtual machine image and confi gures the network.
5. OpenStack returns the status back to Ansible Tower and Ansible Tower returns back the status to the web application. 6. If status is successful, Cyber Range software displays the Windows or Linux icon that enables a hyperlink to open the console.
Integration With the integration of the Ansible Tower with OpenStack to the Cyber Range software, we are able to build an application that provides on-demand training and real-world scenarios to our customers throughout the globe. The integration with the Ansible REST API with the playbooks has greatly leveraged many of the codes required for provisioning to a more systemised
automated process. Hence, the key points of this article are: • Ansible can automate a variety of IT tasks, including system provisioning, software package installation, network confi guration and security, as well as instance provisioning of a cloud service. • The approach of using playbooks, which simplify the tasks of orchestrating and confi guring the virtual machines, as well deployment of complex scenarios that may contain multiple virtual machines in a custom network, may need to run custom scripts during deployment. • The unit of the process in which commands are executed one-by-one using a playbook is called task. • To implement OpenStack automation
with Ansible, one needs OpenStack, Ansible, Ansible Tower and a source control (for example, Git repository). We recommend Ansible and OpenStack be considered for automation and cloud infrastructure deployment on other cloud projects of Analog Devices.
CONTACT:
Analog Devices
www.analog.com
Automation | September 2020 9
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