Ansible Roles

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21 July 2019

Why "hardening" is not a role

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Why “hardening” is not a role

I see many developers writing an Ansible role for hardening. Although these roles can absolutely be useful, here is why I think there is a better way.

Roles are (not always, but frequently) product centric. Think of role names like:

A role for hardening you system has the potential to cover all kinds of topics that are covered in the product specific roles.

Besides that, in my opinion a role should be:

  1. Small
  2. Cover on function

A good indicator of a role that’s too big is having multiple task files in tasks.

So my suggestion to not use a harden role, but rather have each role that you compose a system out of, use secure defaults.

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