Turbot Guardrails has always offered four out-of-the-box Ansible playbooks - Linux Users, Linux Patching, Linux Environment, Linux CIS - and has allowed the use of custom Ansible playbooks. This approach aligns with our mission to make cloud provisioning faster, easier, and compliant with enterprise standards.
Over time, our customers made suggestions for improving how Ansible works within Turbot Guardrails. We recently released two of these improvements.
Real-time Ansible
Previously, Ansible playbooks on Turbot Guardrails-managed servers ran as tasks on a set schedule - every 10 minutes or so. This caused an annoying delay during server configuration, as customers had to wait between configuration steps.
To solve this issue, Ansible jobs now run as stacks (instead of tasks), providing real-time and on-demand execution of playbooks.
Real-time Ansible also enables real-time debugging of playbooks, using a second new feature:
Process logs in Turbot Guardrails UI
We updated the Turbot Guardrails UI to give administrators access to all of the Turbot Guardrails Ansible files and logs right from the Turbot Guardrails console. This feature allows you to debug Ansible playbooks without having to switch to the AWS interface; just run the playbook and see the configurations in real time.
Find the logs under Stacks, filter by the Ansible playbook name, and open the event to see the logs:
Contact us to schedule a full demo of all Turbot Guardrails features.