Quality DevOps: installing and verifying Network Time Protocol (NTP)

I lurve Ansible. It lets me install or update software on one or 100 instances, easily. The entire system becomes a set of scripts to run and run and run again until I get things exactly the way I want them.

In today's devops ecosystem, where "infrastructure is code", how do we test our infrastructure?

Ansible gives us one way to do this.  When we install or update a service, run a service-specific command to make doubly sure that things are working as expected. If something's not quite right, Ansible will abort and we can figure out what went kablooey.

Save the following into "ntp.yml" and run with ansible-playbook -vvi myhost ntp.yml

Thanks to phillipuniverse !

# ntp.yml -- install NTP time sync daemon
# Adapted from https://gist.github.com/phillipuniverse/7721288#file-ntp_playbook-yml
#
# USAGE: ansible-playbook -vvi myhost ntp.yml
#
---

- hosts: all
  become: yes
  gather_facts: no

  tasks:

    - name: Install NTP
      apt: package=ntp state=present update_cache=yes
      tags: ntp

    - name: Make sure NTP is started up
      service: name=ntp state=started enabled=yes
      tags: ntp

    - name: verify NTP synchronized
      command: timedatectl status
      register: ntp_result
      failed_when: "'synchronized: yes' not in ntp_result.stdout"
      tags: ntp


  handlers:
    - name: restart ntp
      service: name=ntp state=restarted