topic Re: Automate ArcGIS Enterprise using Ansible in ArcGIS Enterprise Questions

Automate ArcGIS Enterprise using Ansible

MarGIS — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 06:48:55 GMT

Hi, folks

I need to know if Esri support automating ArcGIS Enterprise using Ansible? or if this is doable? Is there any templates for Ansible?

Thanks.

Re: Automate ArcGIS Enterprise using Ansible

JonathanEpstein — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 10:42:01 GMT

There's some pretty nice Chef automation which Esri supports.

https://esri.github.io/arcgis-cookbook/

Esri doesn't support any Ansible solutions, to the best of my knowledge.

At my employer, we've wrapped this Chef automation with our own Ansible playbooks, i.e. we invoke Chef from Ansible. It has been a non-trivial effort.

Our playbooks include references to our own internal tooling, so our code is not suitable for sharing at this time. But we successfully standup Enterprise Esri environments at will, by running an Ansible playbook. We use Terraform to create and destroy corresponding AWS EC2 (Linux) instances prior to running that Ansible playbook.

We got a lot of paid help from Esri professional services, to get this all running.

Re: Automate ArcGIS Enterprise using Ansible

Scott_Tansley — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 23:56:05 GMT

I've heard of organisations creating PowerShell scripts and then using Ansible to invoke those scripts. As Jonathon (above) states, it wasn't a trivial task. My personal feeling on this is that if you're building maintaining dev, pre-prod, prod environments, then it's overkill. It sounds as if Jonathon may be creating project ArcGIS Enterprises that get stood up, used and then taken down. I can see it having value there, but personally I think you could build the environments faster and better using other tools, than trying to engineer this. Needs some careful thought in my opinion.

Re: Automate ArcGIS Enterprise using Ansible

MarGIS — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 11:34:55 GMT

@JonathanEpstein thank you so much, appreciate your help

Re: Automate ArcGIS Enterprise using Ansible

MarGIS — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 11:35:36 GMT

@Scott_Tansley Thank you so much, appreciate your help

Re: Automate ArcGIS Enterprise using Ansible

JonathanEpstein — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 18:01:20 GMT

Scott, for us this effort was worthwhile because our (previous) handbuilt and hand-hacked Enterprise environment was unmaintainable and un-upgradable. Using this approach, we performed a lift-and-shift from our handbuilt 10.7.1 environment to our automation-built 10.7.1 (using Esri's webgisdr utility), and then upgraded to 10.9.1. This was all quite painful, but we are optimistic that from this point forward we'll have straightforward upgrades to 10.11.x and beyond.