LFOps v2.0 – What's new?

ansible datacenter lfops

LFOps – our Ansible collection of roles, playbooks and plugins for managing Linux-based cloud infrastructures – has been released in version 2.0. What has changed since version 1.1?

One thing first: A classic version number according to Semantic Versioning makes little sense in the Ansible environment and is solely due to the release on Ansible Galaxy. LFOps are constantly being built and extended as requirements, software and datacenters change rapidly. In addition, the main branch must always be up and running. So version 2.0 simply represents the current state of development.

Like it DebOps, LFOps is implemented as generically as possible because we want to automate the maintenance of a wide variety of installations, data centers and cloud infrastructures. Our customers benefit from the transparency provided by publishing to GitHub, as well as the implicit documentation and anytime reproducibility provided by using Ansible. Although LFOps is still heavily focused on RHEL, with v2.0 many roles also support Debian/Ubuntu.

Our best practices and configurations for systems and applications are consistently implemented in the new version. The roles are continuously updated to the latest state of the art.

LFOps helps

  • VM deployment with supported techniques such as KVM and Open Stack and is tested with cloud providers such as Infomaniak, Hetzner, Exoscale, CloudScale and others. There is no need to use third-party tools such as Hashicorp Terraform.
  • Ongoing maintenance of systems and applications. Here v2.0 has come a long way.
  • Install and maintain systems and applications according to the latest technology. All roles are implemented using best practices. The focus of development is on hardening, monitoring and backup.

Compared to v1.0.1, where we released the first 4 roles and playbooks, v2.0 contains a whopping 116 newly released roles and playbooks.

For system maintenance, new roles are included in the following areas:

  • Automatic Updates
  • Backups
  • Mailing
  • Monitoring
  • Network
  • Remote access
  • Repositories
  • Security

Highlights in v2.0 are roles for a CIS hardened Apache, Nextcloud with support for S3 and Swift Object Store, and password management with Bitwarden.

For applications, categories served include:

  • Application servers
  • Databases
  • Monitoring and Dashboarding
  • Security
  • Server applications

Also new in v2.0: Application roles are combined into complex "setup_" playbooks that install and maintain a complete software stack, such as an Icinga Master, which itself consists of 26 individual roles that take care of everything from repositories to Apache and MariaDB to Icinga components.

As always, you can find an overview of all changes and details in the CHANGELOG. We appreciate a review on Ansible Galaxy and Stars on GitHub. 🙂

Ansible and especially LFOps are our daily bread to meet the real needs of our customers – the maintenance of infrastructures, Linux systems and open source applications – in a high quality and reproducible way. Therefore: If you have any questions, suggestions or need service & support, please contact us.

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