Migrating configuration management systems to containers

Configuration Management (CM) systems are widely used in modern IT infrastructures. These systems are utilized for configuring servers according to predefined instructions in an automated manner. One of the most popular CM software is Ansible. At the timeframe of this bachelor’s thesis, Ansible was used in one of the Ericsson’s products as a main CM tool. Due to the nature of the product, this CM software required frequent changes. These changes related to both the predefined instructions and the version of the CM tool. However, introducing these changes required the upgrade of the whole product’s infrastructure. Therefore, updating Ansible took excessive time and effort. The objective of this thesis was to accelerate and abstract the current update process for Ansible. To achieve these goals, it was proposed to migrate Ansible into a container with Docker. In essence, this tool would bound the CM software together with related code, runtime and configurations as a separate package. Thus, the Ansible would be isolated from the underlying OS as well as from the rest of the architecture. The solution was implemented according to the researched best practices related to the development of Docker containers. As a result, the final container succeeded to significantly increase the speed of the Ansible updates and isolate these updates from the general product’s upgrade process. However, the study showed that the containerization would still require additional effort in order to gain a production-ready solution. The most crucial suggested improvements would be related to the container’s portability, version control and user permissions