Base
Hardened build
minimal ports, security patches applied at build time
Ansible Control Node
Azure
Developer Tools
a ready to use automation control host: playbooks, curated collections and inventory in place, with no credential baked in
Overview
Ansible is the open source automation engine that configures servers, deploys applications and runs operational tasks from plain YAML playbooks, over ordinary SSH, with no agent to install on the machines it manages. A control node is the machine those playbooks actually run from, and this image is that machine, shipped ready rather than as a bare install. ansible core is installed with every command line on the system PATH, a curated set of collections covering Linux systems, cryptography, containers, MySQL and PostgreSQL is installed system wide, and a tuned configuration, an inventory tree and a project skeleton are already in place. A self test playbook ships with it and runs against the machine itself, so the control node proves it works before you have pointed it at a single server of your own.
Why the cloudimg image
A control node holds the credential that reaches every server you manage, so this image is built around that fact. It contains no SSH keypair, no vault password, no Galaxy token and no authorized_keys at all: each instance generates its own Ed25519 fleet identity on first boot, kept readable only by root, and first boot refuses to reuse an existing key rather than silently accepting one, so no two instances can ever share an identity. Host key checking is left on, which is the setting that stops a control node being tricked into handing its fleet credential to an impostor, and SSH is the only routable listener on a fresh machine. Ansible itself and every collection are pinned and verified by content hash before installation, and an executable licence gate grades every dependency and every collection and fails the build on anything restrictive or unreadable, with the resulting inventory shipped on the image. Paired with a step by step deployment guide and 24/7 cloudimg support.
Common uses
- Configuration management and application deployment across a fleet of servers
- Ad hoc operational tasks and fleet wide inventory gathering
- A ready made control node for CI and scheduled automation runs
More in Developer Tools
Docker CE on Windows - Containerization Platform
Developer Tools
Docker Community Edition is the free, open source container runtime that allows you to package applications and their de...
Docker Community Edition
Developer Tools
Docker Community Edition preconfigured across several Linux variants, running containers within minutes of launch.
GitLab CE Self-Hosted DevOps Platform
Developer Tools
Self hosted GitLab CE with CI/CD, a container registry and Let's Encrypt SSL, preconfigured for AWS.
Accent on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Developer Tools
Around that core it adds a side by side editor with comments and a review state for each key, conflict detection when a ...
Aa
Apache Allura on Ubuntu 24.04
Developer Tools
Apache Allura is the open source project hosting platform, or forge, that powers SourceForge.
Altair GraphQL Client on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Developer Tools
This image runs Altair GraphQL Client 8.5.7, an open source GraphQL IDE, on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.