Day 83: Two Files and Four Parts
Day 83 of DevOps, Day 33 of Azure. Both tasks today were made of parts that are each correct on their own and do nothing until something joins them. An Ansible inventory and an Ansible playbook are two files, neither of which references the other. A load balancer has four kinds of components, and three of them are inert until a rule names all three together. One Ansible task, one Azure task.…
Day 83 marked progress in both DevOps and Azure tasks. For DevOps, an Ansible inventory and playbook were created, allowing one existing playbook to run with a new inventory file. The inventory file, placed at /home/thor/playbook/inventory, connected to stapp03 using the server's hostname and banner as the username. A potential security issue was noted regarding storing passwords in plain-text inventory files; instead, Ansible's built-in vault should be used.
The Ansible command `ansible-playbook -i inventory playbook.yml` executed the playbook against stapp03, changing two tasks but leaving one unchanged as it gathered facts. Regarding Azure, a load balancer was set up with a frontend IP, backend pool, health probe, and rule. The task specified an Azure Load Balancer (layer 4) rather than an Application Load Balancer (layer 7), as the former forwards TCP without any knowledge of HTTP.
On September 30, 2025, Basic Load Balancer was retired, and Standard Load Balancer became the new standard. This change necessitates a Standard public IP SKU for the load balancer, with a requirement for a Secure by default inbound posture. Inbound HTTP traffic is not allowed by default and must be allowed via a network security group, making the added inbound rule mandatory for the configuration.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
