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 Aria
Automation
VMware Special Edition

by Alina Thylander and

Nicole Sholly
Contributors:
Francisco Hernandez,
Vincent Riccio, Sam McGeown,
and Karl Fultz

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 Aria Automation For Dummies®, VMware Special Edition

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 Introduction
I
n today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, staying ahead
requires organizations to embark on infrastructure moderniza-
tion initiatives. However, this effort is not without challenges.
Managing diverse technologies, overcoming human resistance to
change, and ensuring profitability can pose demanding obstacles
for any successful IT strategy.

Organizations also need to adjust their business tactics and pri-

oritize funds to keep their competitive advantage, or cash in on
new opportunities with new income streams. IT teams, which
have predominantly been affected by an increased need for digital
resources, must also redesign their tactics to help maintain and
drive innovation.

This creates an opening, particularly for IT infrastructure and

operations teams that maintain the needs of developers and
DevOps engineers, to streamline IT delivery processes by embrac-
ing modern automation practices. Because the existing IT infra-
structure processes have been too tightly coupled and too inflexible
to maintain modern application development practices, developers
have embraced public clouds and open-source tools without a lot
of IT oversight. Therefore, modernizing IT processes with automa-
tion holds the key to empowering IT to drive innovation together
with developers in a safe, compliant, agile, and scalable way.

About This Book

Aria Automation For Dummies, VMware Special Edition, helps you
understand how you can simplify your cloud experience with Aria
Automation.

This handy guide consists of eight chapters to help you navigate

network automation in your organization. The chapters cover the
following:

»» The need for automation and an introduction to Aria

Automation (Chapter 1)
»» A look at the key components of Aria Automation (Chapters 2–6)
»» A glance at the use cases (Chapter 7)
»» Ten ways to start with automation (Chapter 8)

Introduction 1

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 Foolish Assumptions
When writing this book, we make the following assumptions
about you, the reader:

»» You know the basics about automation

»» You’re familiar with the concept of virtualization
»» You understand at a high level the infrastructure-as-code
concept
»» You’re aware of many DevOps processes and tools

Icons Used in This Book

We use icons throughout the book to highlight important
information.

Look to the Tip icon to learn shortcuts and other information that
can make your life easier.

The Remember icon flags facts that are especially important to

know.

This icon lets you know that we’re about to dole out in-depth
techy info. Feel free to skip these if you don’t need the details.

Beyond the Book

You don’t need to read this guide from cover to cover. Just jump
to a specific chapter that interests you and start reading. You can
go back later and read any chapters you skipped to make sure you
don’t miss any vital information.

For the latest news and information, visit www.vmware.com/

products/aria-automation.html.

2 Aria Automation For Dummies, VMware Special Edition

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Learning the need for automation

»» Introducing the modern, event-

driven infrastructure automation
platform

»» Discovering the Aria Automation

Advantage

Chapter 1
Introducing Aria
Automation

A
utomation is not just a buzzword. With the potential to set
the foundation for major efficiencies, process enhance-
ments, and cost-cutting strategies, automation tools have
become critical for organizations looking to modernize IT and
maintain a competitive edge.

VMware has moved toward an application-oriented,

­developer-driven position, which will be extremely impor-
tant as the infrastructure and its management become more
invisible. Software and application delivery that take advantage
of ­cloud-native constructs will be essential to the success of­
digital transformations, with the infrastructure portion gradually
­moving into the cloud.

This book uncovers VMware’s modern, event-driven infrastruc-

ture automation platform, and it provides you with the opportu-
nity to discover why it’s a great solution for every enterprise.

CHAPTER 1 Introducing Aria Automation 3

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 Understanding the Need for Automation
Before we move forward, can we all agree that building and
managing a multi-cloud environment to support the needs
of IT admins, cloud admins, DevOps teams, lines of business,
and developers is complicated? Traditionally, the IT landscape
has struggled with widespread human error, over-provisioned
resources, and poor governance. The lack of automation led to
failed deployments, compliance and security risks, below par
performance, and downtime issues. Moreover, IT teams couldn’t
keep up with business needs as legacy manual processes slowed
application delivery and developers found themselves waiting
weeks for their environments to function properly.

So, what does it take for IT to pivot away from traditional ­workload
management toward a more agile infrastructure and application
configuration, provisioning, DevOps life cycle operations, orches-
tration of cloud, and software-defined data center environments?
Automation is at the heart of this, with a bold new approach to
technological practices.

Welcoming the Modern, Event-Driven

Infrastructure Automation Platform
In today’s world, business agility is driven by software agility,
and all software needs to run on a cloud for an efficient provi-
sioning of the underlying infrastructure. The cloud can be public,
private, or hybrid, and it must have various key attributes, such
as security, self-optimization, resilience, self-service, and scal-
ability, and it must be rich with services.

We often hear that IT admins spend too much time building and
operating the IT infrastructure to avoid downtime, data loss,
and security breaches, and to prevent performance problems for
consumers. This triggers the need for additional staff to handle
mundane, repetitive tasks, and it increases pressure from man-
agement, audits, and late-night calls.

Similarly, cloud admins have difficulty managing service offer-

ings without a centralized view across infrastructure resources
and applying them across the environment. This leads to

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 productivity issues due to lack of security and governance, ­affecting
credibility and relevance to DevOps teams. DevOps engineers
struggle to keep up with their SLAs. They are on call for downtime
in production and need to be able to identify and troubleshoot
events that can affect availability and performance of the soft-
ware. Common challenges they must deal with include processes
that are ­insufficiently automated and not transparent across the
infrastructure and app life cycle.

The decision makers struggle to maintain relevance in a changing

world and combat the perception of legacy and outdated IT, which
leads to reduced DevOps credibility. They’re bogged down with
multi-cloud deployment models, technology stacks using loosely
connected open-source components, and complex automation
workflows. As a result, they’re unable to balance business agility,
business efficiency, and risk mitigation.

Ultimately, end users must find ways to solve these issues to

achieve faster time to market, improve customer satisfaction, and
increase throughput and business innovation capabilities. Like-
wise, decision makers need to assess the impact on cloud costs,
security risks, and business interruption.

To address these challenges, we introduce VMware Aria Automa-

tion, which is a modern event-driven infrastructure automation
platform powered by DevOps principles and open-source inno-
vation, delivering a self-service consumption and delivery layer
across VMware Cloud and public clouds.

Aria Automation includes the following components:

»» Assembler: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) engine for templat-

ing, multi-cloud provisioning, and network automation.
»» Service Broker: Self-service catalog with policy and govern-
ance, including support for infrastructure pipelines and
Kubernetes infrastructure.
»» Pipelines: Infrastructure and application deployment
automation, along with infrastructure pipelining.
»» Orchestrator: Workflow automation platform that simplifies
and automates complex data center infrastructure processes.
»» Config: Intelligent automated software configuration
management tool that can manage, secure, and optimize any
infrastructure — on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge.

CHAPTER 1 Introducing Aria Automation 5

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 These components aren’t released or sold individually; they’re
only available as part of Aria Automation.

Identifying the Aria Advantage

To embrace the digital transformation, businesses need technol-
ogy that adapts and scales rapidly, reliably, and cost-effectively.
Applications are more important than ever, progressively ­serving
as the means by which organizations engage with customers. As
a result, enterprises require more agility and speed ­throughout
their digital processes, including the workflows involved in
the ­designing, deployment, and management of applications.

Designed to deliver self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation

with governance, and DevOps-based infrastructure management
and security, Aria Automation helps improve IT agility, produc-
tivity, and efficiency, so you can prepare for the future of your
business.

Key benefits delivered by Aria Automation include:

»» Fast time to market: Automate infrastructure delivery and

offload manual tasks with advanced workflows and agile
templating.
»» Ease of use: Rapidly set up and manage multi-cloud
environments throughout the life cycle with a native,
self-service consumption experience.
»» Security and control: Establish consistent policies across
multi-cloud environments and strengthen infrastructure with
native compliance management, flexible guardrails, and
vulnerability remediation.
»» Accelerated innovation: Expedite the adoption of new,
cloud-native technologies with a future-ready platform built
on IaC and DevOps principles.

Aria Automation provides an automated infrastructure solution to

central IT departments and DevOps teams in public sector, edu-
cation, commercial, and enterprise companies across all indus-
tries and geographies with vSphere-based virtualized data center,
multi-cloud environments, and extending to public clouds. Some
of the most noteworthy capabilities include:

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 »» Self-service provisioning for multi-clouds: Unified and
consistent IaaS consumption layer with a self-service catalog
that enables users to request and provision infrastructure
resources across VMware Cloud infrastructure or any major
public cloud with IaC.
»» Centralized policy and control: Flexible guardrails including
role-based policies across all cloud environments to
maintain proper security and compliance.
»» Cloud agnostic templating: VMware Aria Automation
Templates support for workloads abstracted from the
underlying infrastructure and destination cloud endpoints.
»» Extensibility, customizations, and integrations: Full
extensibility and customization with Orchestrator, Action-
Based Extensibility (ABX), and built-in integrations with
popular third-party tools.
»» Configuration management: Day 1 and 2 control for
virtualized and cloud environments with intuitive configura-
tion automation, vulnerability remediation, and compliance
enforcement.
»» Infrastructure pipelining: User-friendly release automation
pipelines that enable continuous integration and continuous
delivery (CI/CD) of infrastructure resources.

All things considered, a modern infrastructure automation

­solution can help reduce overall application development cost,
­complexity, and time to market. And it can optimize operations
across a multi-cloud environment for IT efficiency, security,
and agility that supports business revenue growth. The VMware
Aria Automation solution can help transform existing ­manual
­workstreams associated with the application life cycle and
inconsistent policy and tooling across different applications and
environments. It can also help mitigate the risk of inconsistent
security and compliance that could compromise the overall secu-
rity of the data center.

CHAPTER 1 Introducing Aria Automation 7

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Exploring public and private cloud
accounts

»» Diving into multi-cloud resources, cloud

zones, resource mappings, and Aria
Automation Templates

»» Looking beyond Infrastructure as a

Service

Chapter 2
Meeting Assembler

A
ria Automation Assembler is a cloud-based service that
you use to create and deploy virtual machines, containers,
applications, and services to your cloud infrastructure.

Assembler is VMware’s approach to building a seamless,

­developer-relevant, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) first experience
between multiple cloud endpoints.

At first glance, Assembler looks like the place where you can put
things together like toy blocks, but there’s a lot more going on. As
a cloud administrator, you can:

»» Configure the cloud vendor infrastructure to which your

users deploy their Aria Automation Templates
»» Set up projects to link the end users with the infrastructure
resources
»» Import templates and OVA files to support template
developers using the marketplace
»» Delegate the user management and deployment infrastruc-
ture to project managers, freeing you up to focus on your
cloud resources

CHAPTER 2 Meeting Assembler 9

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 As an Aria Automation Template developer, you can:

»» Create and iterate on templates until they meet your

development needs
»» Deploy templates to the supporting cloud vendors based
on your project membership
»» Manage the deployed resources throughout the develop-
ment life cycle

Aria Automation Cloud has a monthly release cycle, meaning that

newer features and enhancements are available every month.

Learning About Cloud Accounts:

Public and Private
Assembler is designed to act as a conduit to consume services
from multiple cloud environments, with public cloud treated as
a first-class citizen within the platform. You most likely want to
have multiple public cloud endpoints configured in your envi-
ronment: AWS, Azure, GCP, and probably VMware Cloud on AWS,
Azure, GCP, Oracle, Dell, and so on.

To do so in a truly agnostic resource provisioning and manage-

ment way, you need to take the accounts and create a relation-
ship between those endpoints. In Assembler, the main types of
Cloud Accounts connections are AWS, GCP, Azure, NSX-T, NSX-V,
vCenter Server, and VMware Cloud on AWS.

vCenter Server is the centralized management utility for VMware

and is used to manage virtual machines, multiple ESXi hosts, and
all dependent components from a single centralized location.

Except for VMware Cloud on AWS, any VMware Cloud Stack

(VMware Cloud on Azure, GCP, Oracle, Dell, and so on) can use
the same vCenter and NSX-T Manager Cloud Account Connectors.

Once an endpoint is added, a discovery process is initiated to ­collect

all the resources contained within each endpoint. ­ Assembler
­collects information around the following object types: Compute,
Networks, Security, Storage, Virtual Machines, and Volumes.

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 Aria Automation Cloud also can discover Kubernetes resources
objects, such as Nodes, Namespaces, Resource Limits, and so on.
These become available whenever you add existing Kubernetes
endpoints or deploy a new cluster at the Resource Kubernetes
Section.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system

for automating software deployment, scaling, and management.
Originally, Google designed Kubernetes, but now the Cloud Native
Computing Foundation maintains the project.

Assembler was built from the ground up to answer customers’

public cloud needs. But interacting with the private cloud is a crit-
ical component of most companies’ multi-cloud strategy. How do
you leverage on-premises resources with a platform hosted in
Software as a Service (SaaS)?

Enter the Cloud Proxy, a virtual appliance that spins up a series

of service proxies for interacting with on-premises services.
Remember that there’s a connector for NSX-T and vCenter Server;
Assembler connects to them via Cloud Proxy.

Each proxy service running inside Cloud Proxy is a different con-

tainer, making it extremely modular and easy to update. Even
though it is a remote appliance, Cloud Proxy management opera-
tions, such as upgrades, restarts, and so on, can be executed from
the Assembler UI itself.

Getting to Know Multi-Cloud Resources

Once you connect your multi-cloud environments to Aria Auto-
mation Assembler, it’s time to organize how those resources are
going to become available and consumed by your end users.

Cloud zones
At this point Assembler has discovered and collected all the
resources contained within each endpoint, among them the
­compute resources. But because you may not want to share all
those compute resources with customers, Assembler allows you
to create cloud zones (shown in Figure 2-1), which are logical
constructs containing compute resources available in regions/
­
zones/clusters from any cloud, that you can organize and assign
into zones (cloud zones).

CHAPTER 2 Meeting Assembler 11

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 FIGURE 2-1: Cloud zones can be added and updated at any time to introduce
more resources without disturbing existing projects.

Cloud zones are bound to a construct known as projects, to give

users access to compute resources. Projects use various mappings
and constraints’ tag combinations to determine which definitions
within the mappings to use.

Resource mappings and Aria

Automation Templates
With the Aria Automation Templates in place, you can now create
mapping relationships (OS Images and Virtual Machines Flavors)
and Compute, Network, and Storage profiles.

Mappings and profiles describe VMware’s multiple clouds’

resources capabilities and encapsulates them behind a common
abstraction definition, that can later be called a Cloud Template:

»» Flavor Mappings: Equivalent to a sizing definition. “What is

a small, medium, or large?”
»» Image Mappings: Mapping of Multi-Cloud OS image name
definitions under a single name reference.
»» Network Profiles: Collections of network details. For
on-premises constructs, this includes IP Ranges, Security
Groups, subnets, and the like.
»» Storage Profiles: Storage types; SSD versus standard disks,
IOP limits, and so forth.

Each of these resources can have constraint tags applied to them.

Constraint tags help the provisioning engine (consumed within
Aria Automation Templates) decide which of the resource map-
pings to leverage.

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 If you want a workload to land on high-speed storage, you would
tag a storage profile with type:performance. If you want to
leverage an external IP address on a workload, you would tag a
network as network:external. Each of these constraints can be
referenced on the Aria Automation Templates and steer the work-
loads to land in/on a desired cloud location.

Constraint tags are different from regular metadata tags, which

can also be used and defined in the Aria Automation Templates for
all different types of resources.

Aria Automation Templates

The Aria Automation Templates can be as simple or as complex
as you want them to be. There are multiple methodologies around
creating these templates, including version control with Git-
based version control servers. For now, we look at a sample Aria
Automation Template, as shown in Figure 2-2.

As you work with Aria Automation Templates, here are a few key
points to remember:

»» On the far left you have a set of objects or constructs represent-

ing resources that you can use, which can then be dragged onto
the canvas in the middle of the screen. You can take those
objects and build connections/dependencies with them.
»» As you add content, the YAML (Yet Another Markup
Language) is populated in the panel on the right.
»» In the YAML, you have inputs configured for username,
password, and the number of deployments to create; you
can define as many inputs as needed, and they’re of
different types, strings, integers, objects, and so on.
»» In this example, we’re using cloud agnostic objects, including
a load balancer. This is all configured within the YAML to the
right.
»» The set of code under the cloudConfig section maps to
Cloud-Init.

Cloud-Init is an industry standard cloud computing configu-

ration tool that runs a set of scripts at the time of an instance
startup. Think of it like the Configuration Spec in vCenter. This
allows you to initialize the operating system, push configura-
tions, ­commands, and packages into a resource you’re building.

CHAPTER 2 Meeting Assembler 13

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 FIGURE 2-2: Aria Automation Template — IaC View (Abstract).

Going Beyond Infrastructure as a Service

What’s not shown in Figure 2-2 is that your capabilities expand
beyond traditional Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) deployments.
You also have the capability of consuming Cloud Native primitives
from AWS, Azure, GCP, and other cloud services, such as Kuber-
netes, Terraform, Configuration Management solutions (Ansible /
Puppet / Aria Automation Config) and Custom Resources.

Aria Automation Config is a modern configuration management

platform with the performance, speed, and agility that IT teams
need to manage large, complex IT systems and improve efficiency
at scale. See Chapter 6 for more on Config.

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 For example, with AWS RDS, users can consume native MySQL
database capabilities without having to manage a full-sized SQL
database (see Figure 2-3).

FIGURE 2-3: Aria Automation Template — AWS RDS Resources (Abstract).

But what happens after you deploy workloads?

Diving into Deployments and Beyond

The deployments in Assembler are the Aria Automation ­Templates
that are provisioned on your cloud account platforms. A success-
fully deployed cloud template represents your final goal as an
administrator or cloud template designer. A deployment enables
you to manage the life cycle of workloads via Day 2 operations as
a whole deployment and/or per individual resources.

CHAPTER 2 Meeting Assembler 15

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 Let’s say you want to add more constructs to the existing deploy-
ment. Perhaps you were doing functional testing and now you’d
like to run stress testing, which requires more servers. Continuing
with the cloud template example, can you add a new tier for the
front end? No problem! You can simply modify the cloud template
by selecting the Update an Existing Deployment option to push
those changes in.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Finding out what Service Broker is

»» Reviewing content source types, policies,

and deployments

Chapter 3
At Your Service:
Presenting Service
Broker

S
ervice Broker provides a user-accessible service catalog of
items that can be requested and managed by an end user.
The end user can view the life cycle of their deployments and
perform Day 2 actions, as well as monitor the deployment
progress.

The cloud administrator can use Service Broker to manage and

present simplified catalog items, customize forms, define which
catalog items are available to which users, and define policies to
manage resource use, deployment lease times, Day 2 actions, and
approval policies.

CHAPTER 3 At Your Service: Presenting Service Broker 17

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 Exploring the Service Broker Catalog
The catalog acts as a type of storefront where resources can be
requested and later consumed by end users. Content is displayed
as requestable items, as shown in Figure 3-1. The rest of this
chapter takes you on a quick tour through the items that are most
often requested.

FIGURE 3-1: The Service Broker Catalog.

Getting to Know Content and Policies

The Content and Policies tab enables Service Broker administra-
tors to configure the Service Broker Catalog and deployment con-
trols, as follows:

»» Content Sources: Here’s where you configure the sources

for catalog items, which we discuss in the next section.

https://learnservicebroker.github.io/Content-
and-Policies/Content-Sources/

»» Content Sharing: Go here to configure which catalog items

are available to which projects.

https://learnservicebroker.github.io/Content-
and-Policies/Content-Sharing/

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 »» Content: Check out this section to view and configure all the
configured catalog items and custom forms.

https://learnservicebroker.github.io/Content-
and-Policies/Content/

»» Policies: Here’s where you define and enforce policies for

catalog items. We discuss this a bit later in this chapter.

https://learnservicebroker.github.io/Content-
and-Policies/Policies/

Learning About Content Source Types

From the Content and Policies tab, click Content Source types to
see which types can be configured (Figure 3-2):

»» Extensibility Actions
»» Assembler Action Based Extensibility (ABX) actions as
Catalog Items:

https://learncloudassembly.github.io/
Extensibility/Library/Actions/

»» Aria Orchestrator Workflow: Configure Aria Orchestrator

Workflows as Catalog Items
»» AWS CloudFormation Templates
»» Marketplace VM Templates (OVA)
»» Pipelines
»» VMware Aria Automation Templates
»» vRA 7.x Catalog Items
»» VMware Aria Automation 8.x Template (AA Cloud only):
Configure VMware Aria Automation 8.x on-premises Aria
Automation Templates as a Catalog Item

CHAPTER 3 At Your Service: Presenting Service Broker 19

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 FIGURE 3-2: Content Sources.

Perusing Policies
Policies allow administrators to control approvals for resource
provisioning requests, resource use, Day 2 actions, and life cycle.
There are five types of policies that can be created under the
Definitions page, which we discuss separately in the following
sections:

»» Resource quota policy

»» Deployment limit policy
»» Lease policy
»» Day 2 actions policy
»» Approval policy

Resource quota policy

This policy restricts total resource use across organizations, proj-
ects, and users by providing the ability to apply numerical lim-
its for each resource type. Limits can be applied on the following
resource types for each entity: CPU count, VM count, memory
limits, and storage limits.

Figure 3-3 shows an example resource quota policy; in it, a limit

is set for both the Test and Development Projects. Each project
has a total limit of 12 CPU, 128 GB of RAM, and 1,000 GB of stor-
age. Each user in either project can deploy up to 8 VMs in total.

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 FIGURE 3-3: An example resource quota policy.

Deployment limit policy

Deployment limit policies control the amount of resources that
can be used by deployments. The scope is also at the Organization
and Project; however, limits are applied within deployments.
Limits are applied on the following resources: CPU count, VM count,
and memory limits.

Figure 3-4 shows an example deployment limit policy in which

a limit is set for the Test Project. The project has a total limit of
6 CPUs and 24 GB RAM, and each user in the project is limited on
a per deployment basis as well.

CHAPTER 3 At Your Service: Presenting Service Broker 21

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 FIGURE 3-4: An example deployment limit policy.

Lease policy
Lease policies control how long deployments are available for use
before they’re destroyed and the resources are reclaimed:

»» Enforcement type (Hard or Soft): In the event of conflicting

policies, a Hard Policy overrides a conflicting Soft Policy.
»» Maximum Lease (days): This is the number of days a
deployment can be leased for, and the number of days a
deployment’s lease can be renewed for.
»» Maximum Total Lease (days): This is the maximum
number of days a deployment can be leased for, including
lease renewals and the Grace period (see next bullet).

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 »» Grace period (days): The number of days after a deployment
lease has expired that the deployment will be destroyed.

In the example lease policy, shown in Figure 3-5, any deployment

in the Production project will have a maximum lease of 30 days,
with a total lease time of 100 days and grace period of 5 days.
Deployments will be destroyed at the end of the grace period once
renewals are exhausted or if available renewals aren’t used.

FIGURE 3-5: Lease policy creation.

Day 2 actions policy

Day 2 action policies control Day 2 actions that users will have
access to for deployed resources, including:

»» Role: You can select the Administrator, Member, or a custom

role that the policy will apply to.

CHAPTER 3 At Your Service: Presenting Service Broker 23

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 »» Actions: Select one or more out-of-the-box Day 2 actions, or
Custom Day 2 actions to enable this policy.

In the example shown in Figure 3-6, Day 2 actions, including

power actions and disk management, are set for vSphere objects
deployed using the selected Aria Automation Template criteria.

FIGURE 3-6: Day 2 policy creation.

Approval policy
Approval policies control who must agree to a deployment or Day
2 action before the request is provisioned. These are the options
you have for setting approval policies:

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 »» Approver mode: Any allows any user from the Approvers
group to approve the request; All requires all of the users in
the Approvers group to approve the request.
»» Approvers: This is a list of users or groups that can approve
the request.
»» Auto expiry decision: The request is automatically
approved or rejected if the Auto expiry trigger is reached
without an Approver responding.
»» Auto expiry trigger: You can set the number of days (up to
7) that Approvers have to respond before the Auto expiry
decision takes effect.
»» Actions: This is a list of actions that the approval policy will
apply to.

Figure 3-7 shows an example in which the selected user must

approve all requests for the specified Cloud Template in Project
Production and for the listed custom action.

FIGURE 3-7: Approval policy creation.

CHAPTER 3 At Your Service: Presenting Service Broker 25

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 Diving into Deployments
The Deployments tab provides Service Broker users with visibility
into provisioned Deployments and Resources that they have per-
mission to view or manage. This is the same view that’s available
in Assembler. (See Chapter 2 for more about Assembler.)

The Resources tab allows you to view and manage the resources
provisioned as part of your deployments; you can see more infor-
mation for a deployment by selecting the deployment name.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Finding out what Pipelines is

»» Configuring endpoints and variables

»» Understanding and creating Pipelines

»» Managing executions and triggers

»» Reviewing Pipeline dashboards

Chapter 4
Laying Down Pipelines

P
ipelines is a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD)
release pipeline tool provided as part of Aria Automation
(either as SaaS through VMware Cloud Services or an
on-premises deployment) that enables developers to model and
automate the entire release process. It incorporates a release
dashboard to help you keep track of all the various release KPIs,
and it acts as the glue between all existing DevOps tools in the
release process.

Configuring Pipelines
Pipelines has native integrations with a range of Endpoints and
can help teams to deliver software and code changes faster,
more reliably, and with higher quality while reducing manual
operations and the operational risk that’s traditionally associ-
ated with releases. Pipelines can also be extended using the Cus-
tom Integrations feature to interact with almost any third-party
system that has an API or CLI.

Endpoints
Endpoints allow Pipelines to connect to remote applications and
data sources. Most Pipeline tasks leverage the endpoints to exe-
cute their actions.

CHAPTER 4 Laying Down Pipelines 27

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 Pipelines includes the following endpoint types:

»» Bamboo: Provides configuration for Bamboo Tasks.

»» Docker (Host): Provides an execution environment for
CI Tasks and Custom Integrations.
»» Docker Registry: Provides credentials for accessing a
specific Registry in the context of a Pipeline Workspace.
»» Email: Provides configuration for sending Pipeline
Notifications, Task Notifications, and User Operations.
»» Gerrit: Provides configuration for use in Gerrit.
»» Git: Provides configuration for Git Repository Triggers.
»» Jenkins: Provides integration to a Jenkins server.
»» Jira: Provides configuration for sending Pipeline Notifications
and Task Notifications.
»» Kubernetes: Provides configuration for a Kubernetes cluster
to use with the Kubernetes Task.
»» TFS: Provides integration to a TFS server and allows the use
of a TFS Task.
»» VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator: Provides
integration to an Aria Orchestrator server for use in tasks.
(See Chapter 5 for more about Orchestrator.)

Variables
Variables are a great way to keep reusable text values or secrets
for use in Pipelines in one central place. Variables can be used to
provide secure access to credentials or configuration information.
Using Variables ensures that sensitive information isn’t exported
if you need to export your pipelines, and allows you to control
access to that sensitive information.

Variables can be one of the following types:

»» Regular: Value is plain text.

»» Secret: Value is hidden but can be used in Pipelines.
»» Restricted: Value is hidden and can only be accessed in
Pipelines by administrators.

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 Variables are accessed in Pipelines by typing the dollar symbol
($), which opens the Pipeline Variables menu. A Variable with
the name of mysecret will be accessed using the notation ${var.
mysecret} in Pipelines and Endpoints.

Custom Integrations
Custom Integrations allow you to write reusable custom code
in Python, Shell, or NodeJS, and execute your code as a Custom
Task in a stage of a Pipeline. When the Custom Integration task
is executed, it uses the docker host or Kubernetes endpoint and
container image for the parent Pipeline.

Creating Pipelines
A Pipeline is the primary mechanism for sequencing all the tasks
that need to be performed. It’s composed of one or more stages
(such as Testing or Release), with one or more tasks (such as
“Test Build” or “Deploy Blueprint”) in each stage.

Pipeline settings
The Pipeline tab, shown in Figure 4-1, allows you to set the pipe-
line name, execution concurrency, description, icon, and tags.

FIGURE 4-1: Enter settings information on the Pipeline tab.

CHAPTER 4 Laying Down Pipelines 29

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 The Workspace tab configures the environment in which the
pipeline runs:

»» Type: Select whether to execute Pipeline Tasks on a

Kubernetes or Docker endpoint.
»» Builder image URL: Configures the container image that will
be used for CI tasks or Custom Integrations.
»» Image Registry: The Docker Registry endpoint to use to pull
the Builder image.
»» Namespace (Kubernetes only): Specifies a Kubernetes
Namespace in which the Kubernetes Deployment running the
container image will be created. If the Namespace doesn’t
already exist, then Pipelines will automatically create it.
»» Proxy type (Kubernetes only): Pipelines communicates
tasks with the CI Agent running on the container image Pod
via a NodePort on the Kubernetes Worker, or a Load
Balancer (recommended).
»» NodePort (Kubernetes only): If you select the NodePort
proxy type, you can leave this value blank to use an ephemeral
port number, or specify a port between 30000 and 32767.
»» Persistent Volume Claim (Kubernetes only): Stores the
logs and output of the CI Agent running on the container
image. If you don’t specify a Persistent Volume Claim, then
an ephemeral volume type will be used.
»» Working directory: This is a directory within a container
image that’s used when running commands.
»» Cache: This is accessible to each pipeline run and can be
used to cache files and folders that are common between
pipeline runs.
»» Environment Variables: Used to pass environment
variables to a container.
»» CPU and memory limit: If a CI task requires significant
resources, the container’s allocated CPU can be increased.
»» Git clone: If the pipeline is triggered by a Git webhook,
CI tasks will automatically clone the Git repository.

Pipeline inputs and outputs

Input parameters are passed to the Pipeline before execution.
Output parameters are produced by the Pipeline as a result of its

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 actions. You can nest pipelines using the Pipeline task to return
the results to the parent pipeline.

You can also auto-inject parameters for Gerrit, Git, or Docker

variables when you’re using Triggers.

The Pipeline model

The Model tab is where you configure the stages and tasks of the
pipeline; it’s where you spend most of your time when creating
and editing pipelines (see Figure 4-2).

FIGURE 4-2: The Model tab.

Stages
Pipeline stages are logical groupings of tasks to reflect the struc-
ture of the process; for example, your process has a Build, Test, and
Release phase. The Pipeline stages can be configured to reflect this.

Tasks
Pipelines Tasks are the basic units of a Pipeline, with different
task types interacting with different endpoints or systems.

Some configuration is common across all task types:

»» Precondition: The precondition field can be used to deter-

mine if a task should be executed.
»» Continue on failure: If checked, the failure of this task will
not cause the entire Pipeline to fail.

CHAPTER 4 Laying Down Pipelines 31

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 »» Task Notifications: Task notifications are almost identical to
Pipeline notifications except that they offer a specific event
for the task.
»» Rollback: The Task Rollback setting allows you to configure a
Pipeline that will be executed if the task fails.

Specific configuration for each task is required, depending on the

task type selected. Available task types are:

»» Bamboo: Execute a Bamboo Plan on a specific Bamboo

Endpoint.
»» CI: Enables almost any action in your Pipeline by executing
the CI task script in the context of a running container. It’s an
incredibly powerful and flexible task type because the image
can have almost any tool or program in it.
»» Condition: Can be used to evaluate the success of previous
stages before moving on with the Pipeline.
»» Custom: The Custom Task allows you to use Custom
Integrations in Pipeline Stages.
»» Jenkins: Execute a Jenkins Task on a Jenkins Endpoint.
»» Kubernetes: Allows for the execution of Get, Create, Apply,
Delete, and Rollback actions against a Kubernetes Endpoint.
»» Pipeline: Allows you to nest existing Pipelines within a
parent pipeline.
»» Poll: Most commonly used in combination with the REST
task to Poll for a job completion status; however, it can be
used to Poll any HTTP server.
»» PowerShell: Allows you to execute PowerShell scripts on a
remote PowerShell server using PSRemoting.
»» REST: A powerful and adaptable client that lets you interact
with any standard REST API.
»» SSH: This task type allows you to execute code on a remote
machine — in this case, over SSH.
»» User Operation: Provides a way to include approvals within
a Pipeline Execution.
»» Aria Automation Template: Can be used to create, update,
delete, and rollback deployments in Aria Automation Assembler.
»» VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator: Allows you to
execute an Orchestrator Workflow.

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 Using variables in Pipelines
Most configurable fields within a Pipeline can also use Variables,
references to Input parameters, and the output of other Pipe-
line tasks or Pipeline properties by using a reference. These can
be accessed by typing the dollar sign ($), which brings up the
auto-completion.

Pipeline notifications
The Notifications tab allows you to configure notifications
for pipeline events (completion, waiting for user interaction,
failure, cancellation, and starting) using an email endpoint, a Jira
endpoint, or by creating a webhook with a POST, PUT, or PATCH
payload.

Executing Pipelines
Pipelines can be executed directly from the Pipeline editor, the
Pipeline page, the Executions page, or from Aria Automation
Service Broker. Executing a Pipeline prompts the user for any
comments and inputs configured for the Pipeline.

The Executions page (see Figure 4-3) provides a detailed account

of every Pipeline Execution that can be filtered by Pipeline, Status,
Tag, or any other pipeline property. It provides an at-a-glance
view of which pipelines have failed, where they’ve failed, and the
error messages returned.

FIGURE 4-3: The Executions page.

CHAPTER 4 Laying Down Pipelines 33

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 Performing User Operations
User Operations provide a way to include approvals within
a Pipeline Execution using the User Operation Task. The User
Operations page provides a dashboard of all active and inac-
tive user operations that the logged-on user is named for in the
Approvers list.

Users with administrative rights in Pipelines can view, approve,

or reject user operations for which they aren’t in the Approvers
lists.

Integrating with Pipeline Triggers

Triggers are a way for Pipelines to integrate with Docker, Gerrit,
and Git life cycles. Pipelines connects to the respective endpoint
through a webhook.

A webhook is configured by an administrator, or through Pipelines,

for a push or pull request event on the Triggers tab. Through the
webhook, any code change events on the remote repository are
received by the trigger in Pipelines.

Looking at Dashboards
Pipelines users can view Dashboards to review historic data for all
Pipeline executions.

In addition to the automatically generated default dashboards,

developers and administrators can create custom dashboards to
view specific results by adding widgets from the menu to display
statistics.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Perusing the platform from architecture
to plug-ins and key features

»» Discovering workflows, actions, and

policies

»» Understanding administration,
inventories, and assets

Chapter 5
Conducting with
Orchestrator

V
Mware Aria Automation Orchestrator is a development-
and process-automation platform that provides a library of
extensible workflows to allow you to create and run auto-
mated, configurable processes to manage VMware products as
well as other third-party technologies.

Orchestrator automates management and operational tasks of

both VMware and third-party applications, such as service desks,
change management systems, and IT asset management systems.

Platform: From Architecture to Plug-Ins

This section dives into the Aria Automation Orchestrator core
components and the importance of the plug-ins to enable features.

Plug-ins
The Aria Automation Orchestrator plug-in architecture allows
you to access and control external technologies and applications.
Plug-ins extend the Orchestrator scripting engine with new object
types and methods.

CHAPTER 5 Conducting with Orchestrator 35

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 The external technologies that you access by using plug-ins
include virtualization management tools, email systems, data-
bases, directory services, and remote-control interfaces. Orches-
trator provides a standard set of preinstalled plug-ins, and you
can develop custom plug-ins to access other applications.

Architecture
Aria Automation Orchestrator is composed of three distinct layers:

»» An orchestration platform that provides the common

features required for an orchestration tool
»» A plug-in architecture to integrate control of subsystems
»» A library of workflows
These layers enable Orchestrator to provide high availability and
scale capacity along with the growth of your cloud. It’s worth
mentioning that with each deployed Orchestrator appliance a pre-
configured PostgreSQL Database is included to store data.

Orchestrator has become a unified integration layer of Aria Auto-

mation and is also helping vSphere vCenter and Aria Operations to
build the Self-Healing Datacenter concept when Aria Automation
Orchestrator is handling the automatic remediation process.

Key features
Aria Automation Orchestrator includes several key features:

»» Persistence: A production-grade PostgreSQL database is

used to store relevant information, such as processes,
workflow states, and the Orchestrator configuration.
»» Central management: The application server-based
platform, with full version history, can store scripts and
process-related primitives in the same storage location.
This way, you can avoid scripts without versioning and gain
proper change control on your servers.
»» Check-pointing: Every step of a workflow is saved in the
database, which prevents data-loss if you must restart the
server. This feature is especially useful for long-running
processes.
»» Control Center: Control Center is a web-based portal that
increases the administrative efficiency of Orchestrator

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 instances by providing a centralized administrative interface
for runtime operations, workflow monitoring, and correla-
tion between the workflow runs and system resources.
»» Versioning: All Orchestrator platform objects have an
associated version history. Version history is useful for basic
change management when distributing processes to project
stages or locations.
»» Git integration: You can integrate a Git repository to further
improve version and source control of your Orchestrator
content. With Git, you can manage workflow development
across multiple Orchestrator instances.
»» Scripting engine: The scripting engine is enhanced with
basic version control, variable type checking, name space
management, and exception handling.
»» Workflow engine: The workflow engine allows you to
automate business processes. It uses objects to create a
step-by-step process automation in workflows.
»» Policy engine: You can use the policy engine to monitor and
generate events to react to changing conditions in the Aria
Automation Orchestrator Client server or a plugged-in
technology. Policies can aggregate events from the platform
or the plug-ins, which helps you to handle changing condi-
tions on any of the integrated technologies.
»» Aria Automation Orchestrator Client: Create, run, edit, and
monitor workflows with the Aria Automation Orchestrator
Client. You can also use the Aria Automation Orchestrator
Client to manage action, configuration, policy, and resource
elements.
»» Development and resources: The Aria Automation
Orchestrator landing page provides quick access to resources
to help you develop your own plug-ins for use in
Orchestrator.
»» Security: Orchestrator provides advanced security
functions, such as Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), Digital Rights
Management (DRM), Transport Layer Security (TLS), and Access
Rights Management (ARM), to provide control over access to
processes and the objects manipulated by these processes.
»» Encryption: Orchestrator uses a FIPS-compliant Advanced
Encryption Standard (AES) with a 256-bit cipher key for encryp-
tion of strings.

CHAPTER 5 Conducting with Orchestrator 37

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 Aria Automation Orchestrator is an open platform that can be
extended with new plug-ins and content and can be integrated
into larger architectures through a REST API.

Diving into the Dashboard

The Aria Automation Orchestrator Client dashboard, available as
a web-based UI, provides a useful tool for monitoring, managing,
and troubleshooting Aria Automation Orchestrator System and
Client workflows. Information on the Aria Automation Orchestra-
tor Client dashboard is spread among five panels:

»» The Workflow Runs panel provides visual data about the

number of running, waiting, and failed workflow runs.
»» The Favorite Workflows panel displays workflows added to
favorites.
»» The Waiting for Input panel is where you see pending
workflow runs that require further user interaction. These
workflows are also displayed in the notifications menu in the
upper-right corner of the UI.
»» Manage your recent workflow runs in the Recent Workflow
runs panel, which shows the name, state, start date, and end
date of the workflow run.
»» The Requiring Attention panel displays failed workflow
runs and workflow run performance metrics.

Additionally, you can use the Aria Automation Orchestrator Client

Dashboard and profiling feature to gather useful metrics about
your Orchestrator environment.

Looking at Workflows, Actions,

and Policies
You develop workflows and actions in the Aria Automation
Orchestrator Client. Workflow and actions development involves
using the workflow editor, the Aria Automation Orchestrator APIs,
and the JavaScript, Python, Node.js, and PowerShell scripting
languages.

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 Policies can be defined for aggregating events from the platform
or the plug-ins, which helps you to handle changing conditions
on any of the integrated technologies.

Workflows
Orchestrator provides a standard library of workflows, actions,
and policies that you can use to automate operations in your
virtual infrastructure.

The workflows in the standard library are locked in a read-only

state.

Workflows combine actions, decisions, and results that, when per-

formed in a particular order, finish a specific task or a specific
process in a virtual environment. Workflows perform tasks such
as provisioning virtual machines, backing up, performing regu-
lar maintenance, sending emails, performing SSH operations,
managing the physical infrastructure, and other general utility
operations.

Workflows accept inputs according to their function. You can cre-

ate workflows that run according to defined schedules, or that run
if certain anticipated events occur. Information can be provided
by you, by other users, by another workflow or action, or by an
external process such as a web service call from an application.
Workflows perform some validation and filtering of information
before they run.

Workflows can call upon other workflows. For example, you can
have workflow that calls up another workflow to create a new
virtual machine.

You create workflows by using the Aria Automation Orchestra-

tor Client interface’s integrated development environment (IDE),
that provides access to the workflow library and the ability to run
workflows on the workflow engine.

Actions
The Aria Automation Orchestrator Client provides libraries of
predefined actions and an action editor for custom action scripts.
Actions represent individual functions that you use as building
blocks in workflows.

CHAPTER 5 Conducting with Orchestrator 39

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 Actions are JavaScript, Python, Node.js, or PowerShell functions.
Actions can take multiple input parameters and have a single
return value. Actions can call on any object in the Aria Automation
Orchestrator API Explorer, or objects in any API that you import
into Orchestrator by using a plug-in.

Policies
Policies are event triggers that monitor the activity of the system.
Policies respond to predefined events issued by changes in the
status or performance of specific Orchestrator objects.

Policies are a series of rules, gauges, thresholds, and event filters

that run certain workflows or scripts when specific predefined
events occur in Orchestrator or in the technologies that Orches-
trator accesses through plug-ins.

Orchestrator constantly evaluates the policy rules while the policy

is running. For instance, you can implement policy gauges and
thresholds that monitor the behavior of vCenter Server objects of
the VC:HostSystem and VC:VirtualMachine types.

Keeping Track of Inventory

As an administrator, you can use groups to set what Orchestrator
content users can view, such as accessing the inventory, manag-
ing Git repositories and full push/pull Git history, and reviewing
the audit logs.

As an administrator or user, you can use Aria Automation Orches-

trator Client UI to access the Aria Automation Orchestrator con-
tent, including the object inventory.

The Technologies plug-ins (for example, vCenter, vRA, AD, and so

on) expose all objects of the connected vCenter Server instances in
the Inventory view.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Studying Config

»» Exploring the core features of Config

»» Learning Config architecture

Chapter 6
Connecting with Config

C
onfig is a modern configuration management and orchestra-
tion tool designed to help organizations manage their IT
infrastructure. It sits on top of Salt and provides a UI into your
Salt Infrastructure to help manage jobs and other activities. Config
can be used to enforce configurations across applications and infra-
structure using simple scripting and programming languages.

Config also uses event-driven automation to detect and auto-

remediate drift. The software supports both agent and agentless
options for managing systems; the agent provides some addi-
tional capabilities like self-healing.

Salt is a Python-based open-source remote execution framework

for configuration management, automation, and orchestration. Salt
supports the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach to deployment
and data center management. Running commands on systems is
the core function of Salt. A powerful advantage of using a platform
like Salt is that it maintains the configuration of those systems.

Config provides a GUI to manage the Salt environment as well as

features like:

»» Role-based access controls

»» Job scheduling
»» Activity logging
»» And much more!

CHAPTER 6 Connecting with Config 41

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 Getting a General Overview of Config
Architecture
Before we dive into the features of Config, it’s helpful to under-
stand the architecture of Salt and Config.

Aria Suite Lifecycle can be used to manage and deploy the Config
appliance. The architecture is shown in Figure 6-1.

FIGURE 6-1: Single Node Config.

In the figure, Aria Suite Lifecycle provides management and

installation capabilities for Aria Automation and Config. Notice
that the PostgreSQL, Redis, and Config services are all in one
appliance.

Looking at Multi-Node Architecture

For very large environments, certain architectures can provide
more scalability and redundancy.

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 Figure 6-2 shows Config providing a user interface to the Salt
Masters and Minions. Also notice that a PostgreSQL and Redis
database are separated onto their own machine. Config stores all
of its data in the PostgreSQL. The Salt Master is the main connec-
tion for Config and the rest of the nodes in the environment.

FIGURE 6-2: Config Architecture.

Each Salt Master (a server running all the services needed to push
jobs and commands to the Minions) communicates with Config
and provides visibility into the Minions (any system under man-
agement, like a webserver, database server, IIS server, and so on).
Salt Masters and Minions communicate via a secure channel. AES
and RSA keys are created at the time that the Minion is registered
with the Salt Master. Then users can take advantage of a UI-based
system for running jobs and commands against those Minions.

Figure 6-3 shows a Salt Minion attempting to register with a Salt

Master. The Administrator can then accept the key manually, or
the system can be configured to auto-accept keys based on certain
criteria of the Minion, such as its MinionID. For instance, if the
MinionID contains the word “prod” then logic can be written to
automatically accept the key without Administrator intervention.

CHAPTER 6 Connecting with Config 43

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 FIGURE 6-3: A Salt Minion registers with the Salt Master.

After the key has been accepted, the Administrator can begin to
run jobs against the Minion.

Salt Masters don’t initiate communication with the Minions when

a job is ready. The Minions are constantly asking the Salt Master
whether it has a job it needs to run. This is done via the event-bus.
Keep in mind that this works when the agent is installed.

Regardless of the architecture chosen, all of the features that are

in the next section will be available.

Exploring Config Features

In this section we explain core Salt concepts and event-driven
systems.

Salt grains
Salt comes with an interface to derive information about the
underlying system. This is called the grains interface because it
presents Salt with grains of information. Grains are collected for
the operating system, domain name, IP address, kernel, OS Type,
memory, and many other properties of the system.

A number of grains get set out of the box; however, custom grains
can also be created. Think of grains as characteristics of the Minion

44 Aria Automation For Dummies, VMware Special Edition

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 that can be presented to the Salt Master. The Salt Master can then
make decisions based on the grains, such as whether a job should
run on the Minion (targeting), set conditional commands that may
depend on a certain type of grain, provide reporting. Figure 6-4
shows how grains are sent up to the Salt Master.

FIGURE 6-4: The grains are sent up to the Salt Master.

Salt states
Salt provides a method for configuring Minions by declaring
which state a Minion should be in, otherwise referred to as Salt
states. Salt states make configuration management possible. You
can use Salt states to deploy and manage infrastructure with
simple YAML files. Using states, you can automate recursive and
predictable tasks by queueing jobs for Salt to implement without
needing user input. Salt states can contain:

»» Multi-language renderers: You can write states in lan-

guages like YAML, JSON, or Python.
»» Conditions and variable state options: You can define certain
conditions to be met before running a command in a state.

CHAPTER 6 Connecting with Config 45

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 »» Inclusion of other states: You can run a state file from
another state file.

State files declare how you want the machine to be configured.

A simple state file to install Apache would look something like
Figure 6-5.

FIGURE 6-5: Apache Install State.

The first line is just a custom identifier that explains what you
want to do in the state; the pkg.installed is the function and
module being called. The name parameter tells the system which
package needs to be installed: In this case, it’s apache. If you
wanted to ensure that the Apache services is running, you would
add more to this state file.

Pillar data
Salt pillar brings data into the cluster from the opposite direction
to grains. While grains data is generated from the Minion, the
pillar is data generated from the Salt Master. Pillars are organized
similarly to states and act to coordinate pillar data to environ-
ments and Minions with access to the data. Pillar data is used for
the following types of data:

»» Highly sensitive data: Information transferred via the pillar

has a dictionary generated for the targeted Minion and is
encrypted with that Minion’s key for secure data transfer.
»» Minion configurations: Variables and other data can be
stored in the pillar and used over and over again.

As shown in Figure 6-6, pillar data can be stored in a couple of

places in the Salt environment, either on the Salt Master itself or
in the Pillars section of the UI.

You can call the data from the pillar in a state file via a command
pillar.get (see Figure 6-7). You can place the value of that pillar
data into a variable and use it in your state files. Then your states
can call the variables where needed.

46 Aria Automation For Dummies, VMware Special Edition

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 FIGURE 6-6: Pillar data store in Config.

FIGURE 6-7: Calling pillar data from state.

Event bus-driven automation

The Salt event bus system is used to fire off events that can be
seen and acted upon by both Salt Masters and Minions. Events are
fired on the Salt Master for situations like Minion authenticat-
ing, job activity, Salt-key events, Minions starting up, and more.
When these events fire they can be viewed by the administrator by
running this command on the Salt Master:

salt-run state.event pretty=True

The events can also trigger things to happen in the environment

without administrator intervention, like the auto-acceptance of a
Minion key.

Reactors
The reactor system leverages the Salt Master event bus to trigger
Salt state responses to targeted events (see Figure 6-8). Reactors
expand Salt’s ability with automation responses using pre-written
remediation states. Reactors can be applied to a variety of scenarios:

»» Restarting failed applications

»» Automatic rollback
CHAPTER 6 Connecting with Config 47

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 »» Infrastructure scaling
»» Notifying administrators
»» Kicking off orchestration

FIGURE 6-8: The reactor system leverages the Salt Master event bus to trigger
Salt state responses.

Reactor configurations need to be on the Salt Master. Typical best

practice is to create a reactor.conf file and copy it to the master
in the directory /etc/salt/master.d/reactor.conf.

In the reactor.conf example, whenever a Minion tries to authen-

ticate with the Salt Master (salt/auth), the reactor sees that on the
event bus, and the reactor tells the Master to run the accept-key.
sls. The accept-key.sls has instructions on what to do next.

Beacons
Beacons is a monitoring tool set up on the Minion. Beacons can be
leveraged for a number of purposes:

»» Check for file system changes

»» Check for service status (service stopped, and so on)
»» Shell activity, such as user logins
»» Resource monitoring for network and disk usage

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Introducing the five strategic use cases
for your business

»» Highlighting outcomes and benefits

»» Getting started: Your automation

journey begins now

Chapter 7
Looking at Use Cases

A
modern infrastructure automation solution can help
reduce overall application development cost, complexity,
and time to market. It can also optimize operations
across a multi-cloud environment for IT efficiency, security, and
agility that supports business revenue growth.

VMware Aria Automation can help transform existing manual

workstreams associated with the application life cycle, inconsis-
tent policy, and tooling across different applications and environ-
ments. It can also help mitigate the risk of inconsistent security
and compliance that could compromise the overall security of the
data center.

This chapter helps you to take advantage of Aria Automation.

You’ll discover how to apply the five strategic automation use
cases for your business and gain a competitive advantage.

Self-Service Multi-Cloud
If you work in IT or support, you’ll be familiar with a common
catch-22. Should you pay attention to immediate business needs,
especially around the restrictions of your current environment, or
focus on the latest developments in technology that can support
productivity and value longer-term?

CHAPTER 7 Looking at Use Cases 49

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 Adopting self-service automation can deliver numerous benefits
and help IT transform for the future. And the good news is that you
may already have most of what’s required in place. Self-service is
clearly not a new concept, so why pay attention to it now?

Clearly, the COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated an existing

need to transform IT. Self-service automation has taken cen-
ter stage because it is seen as both an efficiency and transfor-
mation enabler due to automation capabilities in areas such as
resource provisioning, application deployment, and overall sys-
tems orchestration.

Customers can automate VMware Cloud Foundation to implement

an on-premises, self-service private cloud or VMware Cloud (for
example, VMware Cloud on AWS) to implement a self-service
public cloud. Aria Automation offers a single VMware Cloud API
for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) along with cloud organiza-
tion constructs that uniquely delineate the IT operator, along with
consumer roles and responsibilities for VMware infrastructure.

As a result, Aria Automation can enable rapid implementation

of multi-cloud environments with a unified self-service provi-
sioning layer along with a seamless workload portability across
private and public cloud infrastructure. Furthermore, it offers
the ability to apply the same self-service catalog, content, and
policies, providing centralized and streamlined operations with
unified visibility and management across multi-cloud environ-
ments while providing developers with a single, consistent digital
foundation to interact with programmatically.

In the context of self-service multi-clouds, Aria Automation

provides:

»» Portability: Leverage a unified self-service provisioning and

catalog layer with seamless workload portability across
private and public clouds.
»» Flexibility: Enable automated infrastructure provisioning by
providing a self-service catalog and pipelining infrastructure
for cloud admins, and manage it with governance policies for
better insights and control.
»» Choice: Build designs from scratch using a rich set of building
blocks (cloud-agnostic provisioning, AWS infrastructure-as-a-
service, AWS services), or request designs and images from
third-party platforms via the self-service catalog.

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 DevOps for Infrastructure
DevOps started as a buzzword that eventually managed to gain
enough traction to become a movement. The idea of DevOps came
from developers who decided to apply their powerful toolchain
and agile processes to traditional IT Ops responsibilities.

When you hear about DevOps for Infrastructure through the lens
of Aria Automation, it’s really about how you can apply the prin-
ciples and mechanics of DevOps to the delivery of an infrastruc-
ture automation platform that provides services to support the
needs of internal development teams.

The DevOps cycle is a continuous loop, broken down into vari-

ous stages. The stages have different definitions, but the majority
converge on plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate, and
monitor.

It’s important to understand the key principles that most DevOps

implementations incorporate: automation, iterative development,
self-service, collaboration, knowledge sharing, observability, and
traceability. Don’t confuse the DevOps principles with the DevOps
mechanics (cycles and phases).

In the world of infrastructure, this typically boils down to three

things:

»» Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): The ability to express and

manipulate infrastructure the same way as application code.
The goal of IaC is to automate the provisioning and mainte-
nance of the infrastructure to the highest degree possible.
What is in fact coded is the Ops’ intent via policies and
variables and end-user needs via inputs and tags.
»» Iterative development with GitOps: The collaborative
updating of the infrastructure, by the developers and/or
operators, as infrastructure needs evolve. Iterative develop-
ment can use imperative or declarative language and ensures
proper collaboration and accountability by leveraging
Git-based version control systems (VCS).

CHAPTER 7 Looking at Use Cases 51

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 »» Infrastructure pipelines: Continuous delivery pipelines,
specifically built to manage infrastructure in an automated
way. CI/CD tools are the skeleton of any DevOps implemen-
tation. Infrastructure pipelines bring the best practices from
the CI/CD world to traditional IT processes. With direct
integrations to IaC tools and low-code pipeline, interfaces
can greatly help IT departments adopt DevOps practices.

Aria Automation delivers benefits in three areas: scale, speed

to market, and reliability. Customers achieve a positive ROI via
efficiency, higher productivity, and faster time to value —
delivering infrastructure with faster, smaller, and more frequent
release cycles that allow scalability and reliability. In addition,
I&O teams can satisfy the iterative development needs of devel-
opers, SREs, and DevOps engineers with frictionless governance
for a better software quality and/or customer satisfaction.

These drivers are equally important in the infrastructure as they

are in the application world. Typically, infrastructure delivery
needs to be in lockstep with software delivery. Otherwise, IT
becomes the bottleneck. And, for better or worse, in today’s cloud
world, IT bottlenecks are quite easy to bypass.

Kubernetes Infrastructure Automation

Kubernetes is the most popular technology in IT today. It has been
the rising star for the last couple of years and is gaining trac-
tion within the IT community as the new standard for deploying
applications.

VMware has incorporated Kubernetes into its strategy. It is the

technology that’s evolving the application runtime space. Pre-
viously, the virtual machine was the preferred delivery method,
but now the container is becoming the new normal. This doesn’t
mean virtual machines will go away. The result is that providers of
infrastructure resources now need to be able to provide two things
to their consumers: virtual machines and containers enabled by
Kubernetes.

The goal is twofold:

»» To productize and industrialize Kubernetes so that it’s easy

to consume, deploy, and manage by both developers and

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 infrastructure operators, with or without extensive
Kubernetes experience
»» To create a similar experience to the management and
operations of virtual machines

At the management layer, all infrastructure and application

resources need to be managed. The Aria and CloudHealth product
portfolio provides capabilities to manage Kubernetes from a cost,
security, and compliance perspective. Specifically, Aria Automa-
tion provides a platform that enables virtual administrators to
manage Kubernetes the same way they’ve traditionally managed
virtual machine workloads.

As a result, the customer can enable Kubernetes cluster man-

agement, self-service, and application deployment in a mixed,
virtualized, and Kubernetes infrastructure through a central
management plane with a unified operating/governance and
consumption model. It can provide the ability to manage and
govern Kubernetes clusters and namespaces, as well as discover
and import clusters; empower developers to request Kubernetes
clusters and namespace self-service from a catalog; and enable
Kubernetes application deployment on clusters from pipelines.

Aria Automation provides numerous benefits for Kubernetes

infrastructure automation, such as the ability to:

»» Streamline development and agile operations: Accelerate

innovation for modern cloud native applications.
»» Take advantage of existing investments in VMware
technology and skillsets: Gain flexibility with extensible
integrations with VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated
Edition, VMware vSphere with Tanzu, and Red Hat OpenShift
Container Platform.
»» Simplify Kubernetes management for operators: Ensure
consistency in the application of your operational
requirements.

VMware is investing heavily in its software portfolio to extend

existing solutions and build new ones for Kubernetes. VMware can
support businesses when it comes to building, running, and man-
aging Kubernetes at scale within your IT organization, whether
that’s in the private, hybrid, or public cloud.

CHAPTER 7 Looking at Use Cases 53

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 Network Automation
With users worldwide communicating, collaborating, and trans-
acting through business-critical applications and services,
organizations everywhere are pursuing new and differentiated
business models and revenue sources that require a modern,
agile IT infrastructure. Organizations need to release innovative
and updated applications and services more frequently, and with
enhanced reliability and security.

Network automation is the key to integrating multiple parts

of the IT organization — from network engineering to cloud
operations — and to modernizing IT processes across the IT
delivery cycle to gain a competitive advantage.

VMware has a unique and powerful network automation solution

that enables faster deployment and completes life cycle automa-
tion of traditional and modern applications with networking and
security services. By enabling consistency across clouds, VMware
helps organizations achieve faster time to market, operational
savings, productivity gains, and business resiliency.

VMware network automation automates VMware NSX with

VMware Aria Automation. It combines the Aria Automation
modern infrastructure automation platform with NSX network
virtualization to enable rapid application rollout with networking
and security services. By applying DevOps principles to network
infrastructure delivery, this solution ensures that network policies
are managed with workloads to eliminate operational bottlenecks
in the application life cycle. This solution enables fast, consis-
tent networking and better security for VM- and container-based
workloads across private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

Here are the benefits:

»» Gain business agility, supporting faster delivery of

applications: Support the business rollout of new products
and services and move into new markets, while reducing
CapEx and OpEx.
»» Establish consistent infrastructure and operations:
Enable a multi-cloud strategy and support both traditional
and modern cloud native applications.

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 »» Quickly configure consistent networking and security
across applications, environments, and clouds: Reduce
application provisioning time from weeks to minutes, while
ensuring standardized environments and avoiding configu-
ration drift.

With network automation, you can leverage faster deployment

and complete life cycle automation of traditional virtual machine
(VM) and modern container-based applications with consis-
tent networking and security services across private, hybrid, and
multi-cloud environments.

Security Operations
Security operations is a collaboration between IT security and
operations teams that integrates tools, processes, and technology
to keep an enterprise secure while reducing risk.

As information security teams become more important in organi­

zations, a distinct gap often arises between them and IT opera-
tions teams. Each has fundamentally different priorities, which
can result in conflicting efforts and disparate tools that create
inefficiencies, reduce security postures, and open an organization
to greater risks.

Much like DevOps before it, SecOps (security plus operations) is a

movement created to facilitate collaboration between security and
operations teams and integrate the technology and processes they
use to keep systems and data secure. Security and IT operations
teams must work together to keep modern data centers compliant
and secure, but their efforts are often crippled by disparate tool
sets, misaligned workflows, and competing priorities. It’s time
for that to change. Aria Automation for Secure Clouds is a power-
ful add-on component for Aria Automation that gives IT opera-
tions and security teams the automation tools and content they
need to build and maintain secure, compliant IT infrastructure
on-premises or in the cloud.

Aria Automation for Secure Clouds provides continuous operat-

ing system compliance enforcement, an automated vulnerability
detection and remediation feature, plus immediate insights into
the state of your IT systems.

CHAPTER 7 Looking at Use Cases 55

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 Aria Automation for Secure Clouds helps to:

»» Enforce security: Remediate critical security threats across

on-premises or cloud infrastructure with powerful vulner-
ability remediation automation.
»» Maintain compliance: Use out-of-the-box Center for
Internet Security (CIS) certified content to provision IT
systems that start compliant and stay that way.
»» Reduce risk: Employ powerful SecOps automation that goes
beyond scanning to find and fix critical IT vulnerability and
compliance issues.

With Aria Automation for Secure Clouds, security and operations

teams can work together to define a corporate IT security policy,
scan systems against it, detect vulnerabilities and non-compliance
issues, and actively remediate them — all from a single platform.

VMware Aria Automation is an infrastructure automation plat-

form that:

»» Enables private and multi-cloud environments on VMware

Cloud infrastructure.
»» Delivers network automation, security operations, self-service
cloud, DevOps for infrastructure, and Kubernetes automation
capabilities that help you adopt modern automation practices
to increase business and IT agility, productivity, efficiency,
security, and compliance.
»» Automates manual tasks to save time and budget, freeing up
IT resources (already stretched thin due to other critical
business challenges) to tackle the more strategic projects
that drive business value.
»» Integrates, streamlines, and modernizes traditional, cloud
native, and multi-cloud infrastructures to simplify IT and
prepare for the future of your business.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Checking online for a wide array of
options

»» Watching videos and webinars

Chapter 8
Ten Resources to
Get Started with
Aria Automation

T
his book presents an introduction to Aria Automation and
why it’s an important topic for your organization. If you
want to take a deep dive into it, help is at hand. This chapter
presents a list of ten resources to enhance your understanding of
Aria Automation and help you get started.

Websites
You can find a plethora of websites with helpful information. We
suggest you begin with the following to complement this handy
guide:

»» VMware Aria Automation: www.vmware.com/products/

aria-automation.html
»» VMware Aria Automation Config: www.vmware.com/
products/aria-automation/saltstack-config.html

CHAPTER 8 Ten Resources to Get Started with Aria Automation 57

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 »» VMware Aria Automation Documentation: https://
docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Automation/index.
html
»» Learn Aria Automation: https://learnvrealize
automation.github.io/
»» Aria Automation Reddit Channel: www.reddit.com/r/
vRealize_Automation/

Analyst Research
Experts in the field of automation are a great resource. Get an
independent analyst’s view on the state of automation via these
resources:

»» IDC White Paper: Automation, Analytics, and

Governance Power Enterprise Multicloud Management
Strategies: www.vmware.com/content/microsites/
learn/en/350237_REG.html
»» IDC: Worldwide IT Automation and Configuration
Management Software Market Shares: www.vmware.com/
learn/612434_REG.html
»» Transform Your IT with Self-Service Delivery: www.
vmware.com/learn/728573_REG.html?cid=7012H000001
YqqeQAC&src=wb_5fce34a662be7
»» DevOps Trends in Enterprise IT – A Forrester Opportunity
Snapshot: www.vmware.com/learn/672595_REG.html
»» Selecting a Hybrid and Multicloud Management Solution:
www.vmware.com/learn/683326_REG.html

Blogs/Publications
Many automation experts blog about the lessons learned and
share example workflows. Follow their conversations on blogs:

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 »» VMware Cloud Management blogs: https://blogs.
vmware.com/management/
»» VMware Cloud blogs: https://blogs.vmware.com/
cloud/
»» Getting Started with the Aria Automation Terraform
Provider: https://blogs.vmware.com/management/
2020/01/getting-started-with-vra-terraform-
provider.html
»» VMware Aria Automation: https:/blogs.vmware.com/
management/2021/08/whats-new-with-vrealize-
automation-technical-overview.html
»» VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator and Action
Based Extensibility: www.vmware.com/products/
aria-automation-orchestrator.html

Webinars
Webinars are another great resource to keep informed about
automations. Check out the following:

»» Aria Automation – What’s New: www.brighttalk.com/

webcast/18420/466845
»» Introducing Aria Automation Config: https://bit.
ly/3KdCsDk
»» Defining and Delivering DevSecOps Across Your
IT Organization: https://bit.ly/3tuKcuu
»» Introducing Terraform in Aria Automation: https://
bit.ly/3I1N2ep
»» Overcome Fear and Uncertainty To Benefit From
DevOps: https://bit.ly/3zWFbfu
»» VMware events and webinars: www.vmware.com/
company/events.html

CHAPTER 8 Ten Resources to Get Started with Aria Automation 59

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 Discussion Groups
You can join a discussion group to post questions and connect
with your fellow automation engineers in the industry. Here are
some discussion groups to try:

»» Red Hat Ansible Community: www.ansible.com/

community
»» Terraform Discussion: https://discuss.hashicorp.
com/c/terraform-providers/vmware/39
»» VMware{code}: https://code.vmware.com/

Online Courses
You can also take an online class to enrich your understanding of
automation. Here are some of the best, many of which are free or
inexpensive:

»» Networking and Security Architecture with VMware

NSX: www.coursera.org/learn/networking-security-
architecture-vmware-nsx
»» DevOps Foundations: Infrastructure As Code: www.
linkedin.com/learning/devops-foundations-
infrastructure-as-code
»» Introduction to IT Automation: www.linkedin.com/
learning/introduction-to-it-automation
»» Automation with Azure Powershell and ARM Templates:
www.linkedin.com/learning/automation-with-
azure-powershell-and-arm-templates
»» VMware Cloud: Deploying and Managing on AWS: www.
linkedin.com/learning/vmware-cloud-deploying-
and-managing-on-aws

Podcast Feeds
Podcasts are another great way that you can learn from leading
automation experts. Here are a few to start with:

60 Aria Automation For Dummies, VMware Special Edition

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 »» VMware Aria Automation Ask an Expert podcast:
https://soundcloud.com/vmware/sets/
vmware-vrealize-automation-ask
»» VMware Podcasts: https://bit.ly/33a97sN

Videos
You can find a wealth of videos on network automation from
practitioners and trainers. Check these out:

»» Aria Automation Media: www.vmware.com/products/

aria-automation/media.html
»» Aria This Live! (VMworld 2021 recap): www.youtube.com/
watch?v=PMHRYs482Jo
»» DevOps for Infrastructure (multiple videos):
www.vmware.com/products/aria-automation.
html?resource=resource-listing%3Aoverview
»» Aria Automation overview (multiple videos):
www.vmware.com/products/aria-automation.
html?resource=resource-listing%3Aoverview
»» Aria Automation Config (multiple videos): www.vmware.
com/products/aria-automation/saltstack-config.
html

Books
When you’re ready to take a deeper dive into automation, why
not get the blueprint from the technical experts to help you
understand what’s going on under the hood? Here are some book
recommendations:

»» Network Automation For Dummies, VMware Special

Edition: www.vmware.com/content/microsites/learn/
en/544472_REG.html

CHAPTER 8 Ten Resources to Get Started with Aria Automation 61

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 » Cloud Automation For Dummies, VMware Special Edition:
www.vmware.com/content/microsites/learn/en/
40686_REG.html
» Intelligent Automation with VMware, by Ajit Pratap
Kundan: www.google.com/books/edition/Intelligent_
Automation_with_VMware/086PDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
» Infrastructure As Code, by Kief Morris: www.google.com/
books/edition/Infrastructure_as_Code/Wz2Kz
QEACAAJ?hl=en
» Network Automation Made Easy, by Ivo Pinto: www.
google.com/books/edition/Network_Automation_
Made_Easy/ocySzgEACAAJ?hl=en
» The Cloud Computing Book, by Douglas Comer: www.
google.com/books/edition/The_Cloud_Computing_Boo
k/7Ag0EAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

Conferences and Meetups

The best way to learn a new technology is to get hands-on experi-
ence by going to a conference. Many conferences offer low-cost,
pre-conference training workshops, including the following:

» AnsibleFest: www.ansible.com/ansiblefest
» ChefConf: www.chefconf.io/
» HashiConf: https://hashiconf.com
» Puppetize Digital: https://puppet.com/puppetize/
» PyCon US: https://us.pycon.org/
» Red Hat Summit: www.redhat.com/en/summit
» SaltConf: https://saltconf.com/
» VMworld: www.vmworld.com/en/us/index.html

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