Advanced configuration using Ansible¶
It is common to see high-demand scenarios where AtoM needs to be deployed in clusters composed by many machines. When this is necessary, it is convenient to employ configuration management tools like Chef, Puppet or Ansible in order to automate most of the processes involved.
Ansible is our preferred choice because of its simplicity. Artefactual maintains a number of Ansible roles that will enable you to compose complex distributed environments. These roles could as well be used against a single server, in fact our Vagrant box is built using these Ansible roles.
We’ve built an example on how to deploy AtoM:
These examples use Vagrant to provision virtual machines. This is useful during the experimentation phase so you don’t have to worry about the costs of hosting virtual machines in a provider. You could also create a new Vagrant setup where many virtual machines are involved. Check out Vagrant’s docs.
However, the same playbooks will scale well to more complex scenarios where many machines are involved.
Toronto Metropolitan University Libraries leads the development of a similar solution targeting Chef. Their repositories are open source.