MAAS Terraform Ansible Integration

Today, I will introduce the MAASTA project for integrating MAAS, Terraform and Ansible tools together for achieving an end to end automation in the DevOps lifecycle. Before continuing, let me explain some concepts, describe what the problem was and what MAASTA does to solve that dead-end job. Let’s get the ball rolling with concepts.

What is an End to End Automation?

In the DevOps lifecycle, each step has a semantic connection with the previous and the next step. In each one, we use different tools that may not connect directly with others. For example, in Deployment, we may use several tools like Terraform and Ansible that don’t have any direct connections. Even though there is no direct connection between Terraform and Ansible, but in the real world, the Terraform is used to provision cloud instances, Bare-metals, VMs, etc., and the Ansible is used to configure systems that are provisioned by the Terraform in the previous step. The big question is how Ansible can discover those machines to configure them when there is no way to connect the output of the Terraform to the input of the Ansible to introduce them to Ansible.

The traditional way is to run the Terraform to provision machines, write the Ansible inventory of those machines manually, and run the Ansible to configure those ones, but in the end to end…