We use Ansible roles to setup, ogranize and manage our services.
There is some interest to create some documentation on how other entities can re-use our devops repository:
For those who don’t know much about sysadmin stuff (systems administration) here’s a short intro.
To configure a service on a server (this forum, for example) one needs to have a computer always running and install there the forum software. The question is that if that is done manually, then if there is ever a problem, it will have to be fixed also manually
What we do in our organization is to use automated deployment - where why write recipes (ansible roles) of what we want to happen and then run that and then the computer configures itself, magically!
This also means that many different organizations can use the exact same recipes to have the exact same infrastructure as we do.
This is actually a thing that I’ve been thinking for a while now. And there is one example in particular that I wanted to share:
They basically have all the services one individual would need to be pretty much digitally sovereign (i.e. own all the infrastructure: email, calendar, file sync).
But I bet something that could be quite useful would be a sovereign-organization set of ansible roles.
And since we already had all of this cost setting ours up, we might as well make it easier for others to adopt. The drawbacks of course is that for every change we do, we have to think about the places where it is deployed as not to break a service for an organization.
Food for though!