After a long journey of iteration, troubleshooting, and learning, I’m excited to share that I’ve successfully redeployed the Feeditout service using Ansible.
This wasn’t just a redeployment — it was a full re-architecture of how the system is provisioned, secured, monitored, and maintained. I went deep into infrastructure-as-code territory and came out the other side with a more robust, modular, and maintainable setup than ever before.
Lessons from My Ansible Journey
At the heart of this process was Ansible — and it’s fair to say I’ve come a long way in mastering it. What began as a handful of playbooks quickly evolved into a library of roles, reusable tasks, and templated configuration files.
I focused heavily on idempotency, readability, and separation of concerns. Along the way, I developed a strong preference for minimal inline logic and clean, descriptive variable names. I also became comfortable enforcing good practices like avoiding item
as a loop variable and steering clear of unnecessary block
statements unless needed.
Roles I Wrote
Here’s a snapshot of the roles I built and used during this process — each one crafted with purpose:
From security hardening (auditd
, chkrootkit
, aide
, fail2ban
) to service monitoring (grafana
, prometheus
, alert_manager
), mail stack configuration (postfix
, opendkim
, opendmarc
, postsrsd
, saslauthd
), and even custom integrations like chuckbot
, every role played a part.
Each role encapsulates everything needed to configure a specific service — packages, configuration files, systemd services, and sensible defaults — while remaining fully overrideable via host_vars
.
The Payoff
Feeditout is now:
Secure by default with automated auditing, logging, and spam controls. Monitored with a complete Prometheus + Grafana setup and alert routing. Configured from scratch using a fully automated Ansible repo. Easier to maintain, extend, and recover from disaster
Most importantly, I now have confidence in my infrastructure, because it’s reproducible and self-documented through code.
What’s Next?
Now that the foundation is solid, I’ll be iterating on:
- Self-healing features (auto-restart, watchdogs),
- Zero-downtime deployments,
- Better , observability dashboards
- Maybe even a public Git repo or guide for others to use and learn from
If you’re thinking about doing something similar — take the plunge. It’s a challenge, but you’ll learn more about your systems and tools than you ever could from reading docs alone.