DOAG 2017: Automation in progress

A week ago, I had the chance to be speaker at the DOAG Konferenz 2017 in Nürnberg. It’s sometimes hard to find time to be at the conferences because the end of year is quite busy at customers. But it’s also important because it’s time for sharing. I can share what I’m working on about automation and patching and I can also see how other people are doing.

And it was great for me this year, I started to work with Ansible to automate some repetitives tasks, and I saw a lot of interesting presentations either about Ansible itself or where Ansible was used in the demo.

The session “Getting Started with Ansible and Oracle” of Ron Ekins from Pure Storage showed a very interesting use case to see the strengh of Ansible. A live demo where he cloned 1 Production database to 6 different demo environments for the developpers. And doing this way, with a playbook, we are sure that the 6 environments are done without human errors because Ansible will play the same tasks across all nodes.

The previous day, I attended the session “Practical database administration automation with Ansible” of Mikael Sandström and Ilmar Kerm from Kindred Group. They presented some modules they wrote to interact with the database using Ansible. The modules can be used to validate some parameters or create users, etc… I found the code while I was working on my project but I did not dive in the details. The code is available on Github and I will definitively have a closer look.

We can think that Ansible is not designed to manage databases but using modules you can extend Ansible to do a lot of things.

Next week, I have the chance the be also at the Tech17 organised by the UKOUG. Let’s hope I can continue to learn and share!