A while ago I wrote about simplifying your local development with Ansible and Vagrant, then I realized it’d probably be helpful to share your new virtual machine setup with other people. Sharing your prepackaged virtual machine is akin to a docker container but much less magic about what’s going on inside of that virtual machine.

I’ve been working with Zapier’s CLI to create new Zapier tasks and it’s been pretty great. The documentation is great, the tooling around everything is really simple, easy to use and it just always works. The only small pain point I came across was how to deal with multiple environments such as staging and production but it’s a simple workaround to isolate the two.

Travis.ci offers a simple and free way to test your Ansible roles but that’s after you’ve pushed and published your code. What if you want to verify how a change looks on a machine or easily see that build error without using an existing machine? This led me down the path of locally provisioning a virtual machine and outside of a normal virtual machine that I have running, I just wanted a standalone build just for a role.

In this post I’d like to run through how to get going with an Elastic Load Balancer(ELB) within AWS via Ansible. Load balancing your web application is a simple step forward in scaling your request capacity as well as helping out with rolling deploys and promoting/retiring servers in the future. It’s incredibly simple and straightforward to get something setup with Ansible which leaves you with an easy to understand orchestration playbook.

To make context switching easier it’s always a good idea to simplify project specifics with simple bin scripts. They don’t need to do everything but they should at least be a good jump start to get the project going. Here’s a few simples ones that I’ve been using to get my local Ansible and Vagrant setup configured. I utilize Vagrant and Ansible for most of my local development environments.