Demo: Azure MySQL Server

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Objective
What business problem is solved?
Features show cased
Video
Guide

Objective

Demostrate how anisble can be used to provision a MySQL server and Database in the Azure Cloud

What business problem is solved?

speed to market: reducing human time to provision a database
reduce human error: standardize and automation a complex set of steps to reduce human errors
reduce complexity: does not require a System Administrator familiar with any cloud provider or its interface in order to provision any resources

Features show cased

Push button cloud provisioning
Self Service IT - Surveys

For description of these and other features of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform please refer to the features README

Video

Coming Soon

Installing Demo

You will need to create a Service Principal following these Azure Docs instructions
Then set the public_cloud variable to azure. As well as provide the folowing variable values before loading this demo as shown below.

public_cloud: azure
my_subscription:
my_tenant:
my_client:
my_secret:

See sample file named choose_demo_example_azure.yml

Guide

Login to Ansible Platform UX
Navigate to Templates
Click the rocket next to INFRASTRUCTURE / Azure create a MySQL Server to launch the Job
The survey will prompt you to define the resource group, Azure region, name MySQL database, and admin login for database.
Enter values and press NEXT

Explain to audience what is happening here depending on audience persona

Persona A: Technical audience that has written Ansible Playbooks before: Ansible can be used for more than on prem infrustructure it can also be used to provision many resource on the public clouds. Surveys create variables that the Job can use within Ansible Playbooks. This gives you the ability to create one playbook that can be used for reoccuring database provisioning in various Azure regions instead of a job template for each region or mySQL provisioned. Again saving you time and effort to write seperate playbooks for each use case. In the screenshot you will see the variables are named resource_group, location, sqlserver_name, admin_pw, and adminuser with the values you entered

Persona B: Decision maker audience, IT manager or above: reiterate business values above. This allows a non Azure Cloud expert the ability to automate routine tasks within a cloud environment. They can't provision servers that are not vetted and put within the job template or to locations that are not preapproved within the Survey. Freeing them from the mundance and repeative task of datebase provisioning while maintaining the highest level of security and compliance across your organization. In the event that your IT process does not allow the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to be the front end, it has a rich and powerful API that can work with existing workflows such as ServiceNow.
Execute the job by pressing the green LAUNCH button
Explain what is happening:
- Job has started executed in the background. The user can navigate off this page and the job will continue to execute.
- On the left is the Job Details Pane labeled simply with DETAILS. This information is logged and tells you who, what, when and how.
  - who - who launched the job, in this example is the admin user
  - what - the project and Ansible Playbook used, and which credential to login to the infrastructure
  - when - time stamps for start, end and duration of the job run.
  - how - the job status (pass, fail), enviornment and execution node
- The larger window on the right is the Standard Out Pane. This provides the same console output the user would be used to on the command-line for troubleshooting purposes. Some important takeways to showcase are:
  - aggregate info is at the top including the amount of Plays, tasks, hosts and time duration.
  - this pane can be expanded to take up entire browser window
  - Ansible Playbook can be downloaded for troubleshooting purposes
  - click on task output to show them task-by-task JSON output that can be used for troubleshooting or just getting additional information
Circle back and summarize

You need to circle back what has been showcased to the business reasons listed above. You are welcome to verify on the Azure Portal that the MySQL server database was actually provisioned but unless you have a very technical audience you are going to start losing folks. The real business solution here is automating away the mundane and repetative.

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