Introduction

You’ve just started out with Ansible … you’ve made yourself a playbook to install a web server, configure your index.html and other good stuff, but there’s one thing that doesn’t sit well with you … your restart service task runs even when there are no changes to your configuration !!!

This might not seem like a big deal but let’s just aim for perfection and run tasks only when required. A simple way to do this is to use the notify and handlers modules in Ansible.

Getting Started

Just to give some context on my playbook, I’ll be showing how I created…

Introduction

We use Ansible to automate cloud provisioning, configuration management, deployment and other IT operations by simply writing playbooks. It is an open-source tool that increases our productivity at a large scale, saving us a lot of time and hassle when we need to perform configuration management on multiple nodes.

In this article, we’ll be automating a Hadoop cluster setup with the help of Ansible. To keep things simple, our cluster comprises one VM as our control node for Ansible and two VMs as managed nodes, which will serve as the Name Node and Data Node in the Hadoop Cluster.

Setting up Ansible

If…

When setting up a Hadoop Cluster on AWS, launching more instances as data nodes increases the total storage provided. But what if we need to increase the space provided by an individual Data Node ? This is where we can use the Logical Volume Manager.

LVM is used for the following purposes:

• Creating single logical volumes of multiple physical volumes or entire hard disks (somewhat similar to RAID 0, but more similar to JBOD), allowing for dynamic volume resizing.
• Managing large hard disk farms by allowing disks to be added and replaced without downtime or service disruption, in combination with hot swapping.
• On small systems (like a…

What is Ansible ?

Ansible is an open-source tool that provides simple but powerful automation for cross-platform computer support. It is used for application deployment, updates on workstations and servers, cloud provisioning, configuration management, intra-service orchestration, and nearly anything a systems administrator does on a weekly or daily basis. Ansible doesn’t depend on agent software and has no additional security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy. It can configure both UNIX-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows.

Ansible is also useful to everyday users. It allows you to configure not just one computer, but potentially a whole network of computers at once, and using…

“Our intelligence is what makes us human, and AI is an extension of that quality.”

Yann LeCun
Professor, New York University

Introduction

Hundreds of years had passed since early attempts at describing human thinking by philosophers, and the formal founding of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 1956; Yet, significant growth in the field since its founding has been observed only in recent times. With AI now being able to trick judges by passing the Turing test, scientists now plan to develop an updated version of the test. …

“ For our needs, AWS outperforms all other cloud providers, in speed, scalability, reliability, global reach, partner community, and breadth and depth of cloud services available.”

Pete Samara
Director of Innovation and Digital Technology, Formula 1

Introduction

Formula One (or F1) has been one of the premier forms of auto racing around the world since it’s inaugural season in 1950. Formula One cars are the fastest regulated road-course racing cars in the world, owing to very high cornering speeds achieved through the generation of large amounts of aerodynamic downforce.

Formula One is not just a battle between the world’s best drivers…

The average consumer PC might contain 500 GB or 1TB of storage; a mobile phone? 32–128 GB or more; and if that’s not enough we go ahead and use additional storage devices. But how much storage do you think Google or Microsoft or even Coca Cola needs?