Ansible implementatipn: how to dispatch reverse proxy and backend server configuration efficiently?

Question

I'm wondering what is the best practice when deploying with Ansible this kind of situation (which is quite common):

• my.domain.com DNS rule must resolve to my proxy server
• the proxy server (nginx or whatever) serves content from my backend server

How to dispatch configuration to each server?

What I've done so far:

• host_var/my.domain.com -> nginx vhost configuration
• host_var/my.backend.com -> backend configuration

This choice is quite annoying, because it makes me create 2 subdomains each time:

• my.domain.com to resolve and store proxy configuration
• my.backend.com to resolve and store backend configuration

It seems OK for 1 single example, but when dealing with lots of services (think microservices) it seems to me it could be improved.

Do you think about another possible implementation?

Answer 1

If you want to group redundant configuration you have to put your servers in a group in your inventory file.

[frontend]
f1 ansible_host=10.0.0.1
f2 ansible_host=10.0.0.2

[backend]
b1 ansible_host=10.0.1.1
b2 ansible_host=10.0.1.2

And then you create two files

• group_vars/frontend.yml
• group_vars/backend.yml

in which you put the configuration for the frontend and backend servers.

Ansible does not require, that you use any domain at all.