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

Chapter 4. Playbooks and Inventory Files

As we discovered in the previous chapters, Ansible offers unique, easy-to-comprehend implementations for creating automation, implementing Configuration Management solutions, maintaining infrastructure, and scaling out automation. Automation and Configuration Management implementations are developed and maintained using Ansible playbooks (as we discussed in the previous chapter), whereas infrastructure inventory is managed through one or many Ansible inventory hosts file. A playbook in Ansible is really quite simple to understand; it's simply a set of tasks to execute that are ordered in a structured format. These two very easy-to-understand concepts have helped pave the way and made Ansible as popular and robust as it is today.

The concept of an Ansible playbook is an easy one to grasp and understand. The same can be said for the the implementation of Ansible inventory files. Playbook's and roles in Ansible make up the bulk of the automation we will...