Can we get rid of Ansible after moving the digital collections to Heroku? If so, how soon?
We will still need Ansible, at least in the short term, to do the following:
Building ArchivesSpace (see issue #1167).
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However, it’s worth noting that the Ansible build for ArchivesSpace was never really properly finished.
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What’s standing in our way?
Things we have to keep
Things we eliminated
S3 bucket management (see issue #1023). Building the management server itself. Post-Ansible, the managemement server is of dubious importance as long as we can make sure all our remaining Ansible scripts can be run from some other place – e.g. developer laptopsWe are using Terraform for this instead.
Building ArchivesSpace (details). No longer needed since we switched to a third-party host in 2021.
Encrypted information
We’ve used Ansible (specifically, the vault files) as a default place to store encrypted information (e.g. ssl certs, etc.). playbooks can then copy that info onto new servers.
We have moved sensitive information that is no longer required by any playbooks to a secure spot on a shared drive, so we aren’t relying on Ansible for that function anymore. Accordingly, we are moving that info out of Ansible as we move it.
Playbooks and roles
This diff gives a rough idea of the playbooks and roles we have eliminated since the switch.