Book Image

Implementing DevOps with Ansible 2

By : Jonathan McAllister
Book Image

Implementing DevOps with Ansible 2

By: Jonathan McAllister

Overview of this book

Thinking about adapting the DevOps culture for your organization using a very simple, yet powerful automation tool, Ansible 2? Then this book is for you! In this book, you will start with the role of Ansible in the DevOps module, which covers fundamental DevOps practices and how Ansible is leveraged by DevOps organizations to implement consistent and simplified configuration management and deployment. You will then move on to the next module, Ansible with DevOps, where you will understand Ansible fundamentals and how Ansible Playbooks can be used for simple configuration management and deployment tasks. After simpler tasks, you will move on to the third module, Ansible Syntax and Playbook Development, where you will learn advanced configuration management implementations, and use Ansible Vault to secure top-secret information in your organization. In this module, you will also learn about popular DevOps tools and the support that Ansible provides for them (MYSQL, NGINX, APACHE and so on). The last module, Scaling Ansible for the enterprise, is where you will integrate Ansible with CI and CD solutions and provision Docker containers using Ansible. By the end of the book you will have learned to use Ansible to leverage your DevOps tasks.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

The Ansible Inventory


Ansible maintains a central configuration file, which is used to identify and maintain the infrastructure identifications. This inventory file allows the Ansible administrator/ playbook to easily list, group, and target infrastructure items during execution. The default Ansible inventory file created (upon installation of Ansible) is /etc/ansible/hosts. Inside it are a few examples of basic inventory grouping structures and organizational categories for infrastructure.

In general, the Ansible inventory file can be leveraged to organize hosts in a couple of specific ways: as a set of defined groups, or as a set of defined infrastructure pieces (loosely defined and not in a specific group). The inventory file can leverage either of the previously described methods or a combination of the two. Let's look in greater detail on how these two inventory organization systems operate.

Defined inventory groups

Ansible provides a robust and feature-rich mechanism for managing the...