Ansible Playbooks for Alfresco Content Services

[parapadakis]

As some of you know, with the move to support containerised deployments in version 6.0 onwards, the standard Alfresco installer was removed in favour of Helm charts (which we are currently upgrading to Helm 3 and support for Kubernetes 1.16+) and Docker Compose scripts.

For non-containerised installations, the ZIP distribution is available, which requires a manual installation process.

As part of a larger scale review of our installation & deployment strategy across the Alfresco portfolio, we are developing a set of configurable Ansible Playbooks, specifically to simplify installation for customers with non-containerised environments, such as bare-metal, Cloud VMs (i.e. AWS EC2 or Azure VM), and VMware. In terms of components, it will include everything that is currently provided with the Docker Compose script.

Our aim is to create a fairly universal and easily configurable Ansible Playbook, which can be used to support new deployments for Alfresco Content Services 6.x, 7.x (when available) and Community Edition. We will share an updated post when these are availble to review.

Once this Playbook is stable for new installations, the next step is to look at using Ansible to support upgrades, and then build up Playbooks for the rest of the portfolio, as well as bringing Packer and Terraform into the picture for cloud deployments.

If you have any specific thoughts on this, or if are already using Ansible to deploy ACS into non-containerised environments, we'd be very pleased to hear from you.