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Manage containerized setups with Ansible
Put a Bow on It
Cloud rollouts with Ansible, in which administrators create virtual machines (VMs) in clouds and set up their applications there, have changed as companies have increasingly started using containerized applications instead of VMs. Containers can greatly simplify managing, maintaining, and updating applications and infrastructures. However, the prerequisite remains that the application in question is suitable for containerized use. The platform of choice is, of course, Kubernetes, and in the concluding part of this article I introduce you to managing Kubernetes applications with Ansible.
However, sometimes Kubernetes is too large and complicated. In branch installations, remote offices, and at the network edge, Kubernetes might not be needed, and a simple container setup with Podman will suffice. Kubernetes-style functionality for small installations can be implemented quite easily with the "LANP" stack.
LANP Instead of Kubernetes
LAMP is a common term for a web application stack comprising Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP; however, an invention for this article is "LANP," made up of Linux, Ansible, Nginx, and Podman. The idea is simple and coherent. Kubernetes helps you roll out applications in containers, grouped by namespaces and route traffic to HTTP/ HTTPS through routers from the host to the pod. LANP does the same thing, but without Kubernetes. The Linux host runs Podman for the containers and Nginx as a reverse proxy. The host has an IP address and an fully qualified domain name (FQDN).
Depending on the flexibility of the DNS setup of this environment, the Nginx proxy then forwards to the containers either C domains in the style <http or https>://<app>.fqdn or subdirectories following the pattern <http or https>://fqdn/<app> . If needed, Nginx also handles secure socket layer (SSL) termination. You only need an SSL
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