Kubespray Ansible Playbooks Foster Collaborative Kubernetes Ops

--- title: " Kubespray Ansible Playbooks foster Collaborative Kubernetes Ops " date: 2017-05-19 slug: kubespray-ansible-collaborative-kubernetes-ops url: /blog/2017/05/Kubespray-Ansible-Collaborative-Kubernetes-Ops author: > Rob Hirschfeld (RackN) --- **Why Kubespray?** Making Kubernetes operationally strong is a widely held priority and I track many deployment efforts around the project. The [incubated Kubespray project](https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/kubespray) is of particular interest for me because it uses the popular Ansible toolset to build robust, upgradable clusters on both cloud and physical targets. I believe using tools familiar to operators grows our community. We’re excited to see the breadth of platforms enabled by Kubespray and how well it handles a wide range of options like integrating Ceph for [StatefulSet](/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/statefulset/) persistence and Helm for easier application uploads. Those additions have allowed us to fully integrate the [OpenStack Helm charts](https://github.com/att-comdev/openstack-helm) ([demo video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ0vMrdx4a4&list=PLXPBeIrpXjfjabMbwYyDULOX3kZmlxEXK&index=2)). By working with the upstream source instead of creating different install scripts, we get the benefits of a larger community. This requires some extra development effort; however, we believe helping share operational practices makes the whole community stronger. That was also the motivation behind the [SIG-Cluster Ops](https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/sig-cluster-ops). **With Kubespray delivering robust installs, we can focus on broader operational concerns.** For example, we can now drive parallel deployments, so it’s possible to fully exercise the options enabled by Kubespray simultaneously for development and testing.   That’s helpful to built-test-destroy coordinated Kubernetes installs on CentOS, Red Hat and Ubuntu as part of an automation pipeline. We can also set up a full classroom environment from a single command using [Digital Rebar’s](https://github.com/digitalrebar/digitalrebar) providers, tenants and cluster definition JSON. **Let’s explore the classroom example:** First, we define a [student cluster in JSON](https://github.com/digitalrebar/digitalrebar/blob/master/deploy/workloads/cluster/deploy-001.json) like the snippet below | {  "attribs": {    "k8s-version": "v1.6.0",    "k8s-kube\_network\_plugin": "calico",    "k8s-docker\_version": "1.12"  },  "name": "cluster01",  "tenant": "cluster01",  "public\_keys": {    "cluster01": "ssh-rsa AAAAB..... user@example.com"  },  "provider": {    "name": "google-provider"  },  "nodes": [    {      "roles": ["etcd","k8s-addons", "k8s-master"],

This blog post discusses the benefits of using Kubespray, an incubated project that uses Ansible to build robust and upgradable Kubernetes clusters. It highlights Kubespray's ability to integrate with tools like Ceph and Helm, and emphasizes the importance of collaborating with the upstream source to strengthen the Kubernetes community. The author also shares an example of using Kubespray to set up a classroom environment with a single command.