The information technology sector is a fast-moving sector that always tries to accelerate. To keep up with this, companies need to be able to move quickly and iterate frequently. Until a few years back, this was mainly true for software, but now we start to see the necessity to change infrastructures at similar speed. Going forward, we will need to change the infrastructure we run our software on at the speed of the software itself.
In this scenario, many technologies, such as software-defined everything (storage, network, compute, what have you), will be key, but those technologies need to be managed in an equally scalable way, and that way will be using Ansible and similar products.
Ansible is highly relevant today since, differently from competing products, it is agentless, allowing faster deployments, more security, and better auditability.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Ansible, explains how to install Ansible.
Chapter 2, Automating Simple Tasks, explains how to create simple playbooks that will allow you to automate some simple tasks that you already perform on a daily basis.
Chapter 3, Scaling to Multiple Hosts, explains how to handle multiple hosts in Ansible in an easy-to-scale way.
Chapter 4, Handling Complex Deployment, explains how to create deployments that have multiple phases as well as multiple machines.
Chapter 5, Going Cloud, explains how Ansible can integrate with various cloud offering and how it can simplify your life, managing the cloud for you.
Chapter 6, Getting Notifications from Ansible, explains how to set up Ansible to return valuable information to you and other stakeholders.
Chapter 7, Creating a Custom Module, explains how to create a custom module to leverage the freedom Ansible gives you.
Chapter 8, Debugging and Error Handling, explains how to debug and test Ansible to ensure that your playbooks will always work.
Chapter 9, Complex Environments, explains how to manage multiple tiers, multiple environments, and deployments with Ansible.
Chapter 10, Introducing Ansible for Enterprises, explains how to manage Windows nodes from Ansible as well as how to leverage Ansible Galaxy and Ansible Tower to maximize your productivity.
This book is written to work with all Linux distributions. Since it’s not practical to always give the same information for all possible distributions, the example commands are for Fedora on the controller machine and CentOS on the controlled machines, if not stated. Experienced users with other distributions will have no problem in translating the commands for their own preferred distribution.
The book is for developers and sysadmins who want to automate their organization’s infrastructure using Ansible 2. No prior knowledge of Ansible is required.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The ec2.py file will create multiple groups based on the region, availability zone, tags, and so on."
A block of code is set as follows:
--- - hosts: all remote_user: ansible vars: users: - alice - bob folders: - mail - public_html
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
--- - hosts: all remote_user: ansible vars: users: - alice - bob folders: - mail - public_html
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ ansible-playbook -i test01.fale.io, webserver.yaml
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."
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