New Ansible-based lab deployment automation

["Gray, Jonathan" <Jo...@comcast.com>]

Greetings all,

I wanted to make you aware of https://github.com/apache/trafficcontrol/pull/3585 which adds a significant new body of optional work surrounding deployment automation of ATC.  I designed it originally to assist us with creating production-like labs to facilitate better testing use cases not supported by CDN-in-a-box due to resourcing constrains and because we don’t use Docker containers for production ATC components yet.  It doesn’t try to make things turn-key like CIAB, because it’s presumed that each implementer will use different underlying technology stacks that consume horsepower from non-local sources.  What it does provide is a set of generic core roles per ATC Component that ought to be implementable regardless to how the underlying OS was created or managed.  This is a PR I plan to discuss at an upcoming OSS conference next month (https://tinyurl.com/jhg03a-ATC-Talk) and, acceptance pending, at ApacheCon in September to greater depth.  The basic concepts and layouts can be found in the sphinx documentation and in the README’s for each role.

Jonathan G