AWX is a web application that sits on top of Ansible, providing a “user interface, REST API and task engine for Ansible”. Since AWX can integrate into vRealize Automation, I decided to stand up an instance of it in my home lab.
Installing Ansible
Since I was starting with a complete fresh CentOS 8 system, the first thing I needed to do was install Ansible. Unfortunately, Ansible is not available in the default repos configured in CentOS 8, so the repo for it needs to be added first.
# Add EPEL repo
yum install epel-release
# Install Ansible
yum install ansible
# Confirm installation and version
ansible --version
The title suggests an odd combination of topics. I believe there still is an aspect of User Experience in IT Automation. With Automation, a task that was previously performed by a person is being done with a script or the like. This is really one half of the scenario, as we are also replacing the interface our customer was using and putting a new one in place. In some cases, this new interface can be worse than what was in place before.
I’ve collected a number of observations and thoughts about this User Experience aspect and I’ll go through some of them in this article. The examples I present will be relating to PowerShell and vRealize Orchestrator since those are tools I use frequently. But they could probably apply to any language/technology scenario involving automation.
Using The Appropriate Input Channel
This is a “sin” I see often with some people when they first get into PowerShell. I suspect this sin occurs because they were thinking in the context of their script being executed interactively by the user. This leads them to use the cmdlet Read-Host to get input from the user. In a way, Read-Host is seductive in its use. It allows you to assign the user’s input to a variable. The prompt the user sees can also be customised.
Using Read-Host to ask for a username
The problem with this approach is the script will wait for the user’s input. This makes it unsuitable for scenarios where the script would be programmatically executed. In the case of PowerShell specifically, using Read-Host instead of Parameters seems counter-intuitive to the Pipeline model that PowerShell uses, where objects can be easily passed from one command to another. Lastly, Read-Host has no validation of any sort, so performing validation of the input would require extra code. Which leads into the next item…
Using Input Validation
Input Validation can help serve two goals. Firstly providing immediate feedback to the consumer of your automation that something bad was entered. Secondly protecting your automation against undesirable inputs. A bad example the first goal: a coworker who was trying to update details on some Virtual Machines, which involved inputting a project code. He had entered a value that the system didn’t like, but only informed him after he had submitted the request. This created a poor user experience because he didn’t get immediate feedback. The result was he had to fill in and submit the form again.
In the story about the co-worker the form was the front-end of a workflow in vRealize Orchestrator. Assuming the project code was always going to be a number, this issue could’ve been fixed by setting the data type of the input to “number”. A better approach would’ve been to use data binding and bind a list of valid project codes to the input.
vRealize Orchestrator’s number validation
PowerShell has a good range of options for validating input as well, including regular expressions.
Expose Complexity When Required
I consider the wizard for creating an EC2 instance in AWS to be a good benchmark for this. It’s possible to only select the “What” of the instance (what it does). After this, the consumer can immediately select “Review and Launch” from the instance type screen. If they want more control over the details, then they can take a different path. However, taking the “express path” requires very little input or technical knowledge to provision the instance.
A bad example of this: a provisioning workflow prompted for about 15 pieces of information, including which data center the server would live in, which storage, what network zone and so on. In this case, an overwhelming amount of complexity was being exposed by default. It required the consumer of this workflow to have intimate knowledge of the organisation’s infrastructure. This immediately restricts the potential scope of consumers for this workflow, and thus reduces the benefits it would realise.
A middle ground example was a private cloud system I supported, that used similar technology to the bad example above. Consumers could provision a virtual machine with a few abstract pieces of information (what is the server’s role/job? Is it a dev, test or prod system?). However, under certain conditions, like the server’s home being production, more complexity was exposed. The consumer was prompted for things like backup settings. In this case, more complexity was exposed in a way that was appropriate.
Closing Thoughts
There are many more problematic user experience scenarios outside the ones I’ve mentioned. These issues can be negated with some consideration on what is presented to them. This results in a positive experience of those consumers. A positive experience means they’re likely to use it more often and that’s a good outcome.
When VMware created the vRealize brand, they grouped together some of their most complex products under one banner. vRealize Automation (vRA) required the deployment and configuration of two components – a virtual appliance and a Windows server. The Windows server had a long list of prerequisites. In terms of operational management, using products like vRA meant ongoing work on scripts, workflows and other artifacts. The logical response to this is to create a non-production instance to protect your production instance. Moving updates to production could be achieved manually or via VMware’s Codestream product, but both approaches left a lot to be desired. vRealize Suite Life Cycle Manager (vRSLCM or just LCM) is a new approach to this set of problems.
Getting LCM Running
LCM comes supplied as a “Virtual Application” where a few configuration options are required to provision it. One of the LCM-specific settings is whether you want to enable the vaguely named “Content Management”. Enabling this will cause the appliance to use 4 processors instead of 2. Once the appliance is deployed and started, the rest of the configuration happens via the web interface.
Standing up a redundant/highly available database infrastructure can be one of the more complicated pieces of work. Doing it by hand is a long process with any points where errors could happen. It was with this in mind that I decided to use this as my first “project” with vRealize Automation.
A Brief History of SQL Server High Availability
When discussing redundancy or high availability (HA) for databases, there’s two distinct outcomes – firstly to ensure the continued delivery of the service in the event of infrastructure failure (the actual HA part) and secondly to ensure the data is kept in an orderly fashion (data integrity, no loss of data, etc). Where these two activities happen depend on the technology used.
In older versions of SQL Server, these outcomes were achieved using SQL Clustering. In SQL Clustering, the HA function was achieved at the server level by having 2 or more servers, while data integrity was maintained by the database residing on shared storage.
