Book Image

Ansible Playbook Essentials

By : Gourav Shah, GOURAV JAWAHAR SHAH
Book Image

Ansible Playbook Essentials

By: Gourav Shah, GOURAV JAWAHAR SHAH

Overview of this book

Ansible Playbook Essentials will show you how to write a blueprint of your infrastructure, encompassing multitier applications using Ansible's playbooks. Beginning with basic concepts such as plays, tasks, handlers, inventory, and YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML) syntax that Ansible uses, you'll understand how to organize your code into a modular structure. Building on this, you will study techniques to create data-driven playbooks with variables, templates, logical constructs, and encrypted data, which will further strengthen your application skills in Ansible. Adding to this, the book will also take you through advanced clustering concepts, such as discovering topology information about other nodes in the cluster and managing multiple environments with isolated configurations. As you approach the concluding chapters, you can expect to learn about orchestrating infrastructure and deploying applications in a coordinated manner. By the end of this book, you will be able to design solutions to your automation and orchestration problems using playbooks quickly and efficiently.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Ansible Playbook Essentials
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Setting Up the Learning Environment
References
Index

Chapter 10. Orchestrating Infrastructure with Ansible

Orchestration can mean different things at different times when used in different scenarios. The following are some of the orchestration scenarios described:

  • Running ad hoc commands in parallel on a group of hosts, for example, using a for loop to walk over a group of web servers to restart the Apache service. This is the crudest form of orchestration.

  • Invoking an orchestration engine to launch another configuration management tool to enforce correct ordering.

  • Configuring a multitier application infrastructure in a certain order with the ability to have fine-grained control over each step, and the flexibility to move back and forth while configuring multiple components. For example, installing the database, setting up the web server, coming back to the database, creating a schema, going to web servers to start services, and more.

Most real-world scenarios are similar to the last scenario, which involve a multitier application stacks and more...