Chapter 1, DevOps Fundamentals, introduces you to DevOps (a hybrid word connecting development and operations) and educates you on the DevOps movement and how DevOps has in recent years revolutionized software development and delivery at organizations around the globe.

Chapter 2, Configuration Management Essentials, will teach you how tools like Ansible can make developers, testers, and operations work easier by eliminating environment drift, automating the provisioning of infrastructure, and providing an easy and consistent way to spin up bug reproduction environments.

Chapter 3, Installing, Configuring, and Running Ansible, will educate you on where to get Ansible, how to install and set up a control server, how to authorize the control server with inventory items and how to use the Ansible command line to run a playbook or query an infrastructure group. Finally, the chapter will educate you on the core module set and how this provide an interactive interface to other technologies (Git, JIRA, Jenkins, and so on).

Chapter 4, Playbooks and Inventory Files, will further your knowledge on playbooks, playbook trees, roles, tasks, and inventory files. In this chapter, the reader will see some basic examples of simple playbooks and learn some of the various ways to run them.

Chapter 5, Playbooks: Beyond the Fundamentals, will help you learn the syntax requirements of the YAML markup language. Additionally, the chapter will educate you on the Ansible specific syntax for roles, includes, variables, loops, blocks, conditionals, registers, and facts.

Chapter 6, Jinja in Ansible, will dive into Jinja2 templating and how to make use of it in Ansible.

Chapter 7, Ansible Vault, will outline the Ansible way of managing and deploying sensitive information and how to best leverage the Ansible Vault utility to ensure sensitive data is kept secret. You will learn (by example) how to best control and manage highly secure information and learn the underpinnings of how Ansible keeps your information secure.

Chapter 8, Ansible Modules and Libraries, will focus on the wide array of modules provided by the Ansible solution. Modules in Ansible provide the ability for playbooks to connect to and control third party technologies (some open source, some closed source). In this chapter, we will discuss the most popular ones and dive into creating playbook tasks that help manage a suite of tools and services available to developers, testers, and operators.

Chapter 9, Integrating Ansible with CI and CD Solutions, we will teach you how to leverage other DevOps related tools to control Ansible. The specific topics covered will be Jenkins and TeamCity. The reader will learn how Ansible can be leveraged as a post build action, how Ansible fits into a Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipeline, and some examples for each.

Chapter 10, Ansible and Docker, we will educate you on how to use Python to extend Ansible and create custom modules that integrate with unique specific technology stacks. This will be done by providing a set of tutorials that teach the reader to write and release custom Ansible modules. The chapter will teach you how to read input, manage facts, perform automated tasks, interact with REST APIs and generate documentation.

Chapter 11, Extending Ansible, will help you learn the popular features of both Galaxy and Tower and how to use and configure both. Upon completing this chapter, you will have the knowledge needed to act as an authority in your organization for both of the unique and vibrant technologies.

Chapter 12, Ansible Galaxy, will teach how to provision Docker containers using Ansible, how to integrate Ansible with Docker's service, how to manage Docker image facts, and how to gain full control over Docker images.

This book was written with Ubuntu used for the control server and SSH access to target servers. As such you will need an Ubuntu machine or VM to use the tutorials within this book. For the module and plugin creation chapter you will need Python on the Ubuntu system.

This book is for anyone who is curious about DevOps implementations and how to leverage Ansible to create automated solutions.

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 the text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "If SSH key sharing is not available Ansible also offers the option to ask for a password using the --ask-become-pass command-line argument."

A block of code is set as follows:

# File name: hellodevopsworld.yml
---
- hosts: all
 tasks:
 - shell: echo "hello DevOps world"

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

[databaseservers]
mydbserver105.example.org
mydbserver205.example.org
[webservers]
mywbserver105.example.org
mywbserver205.example.org

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install ansible

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: "To install the Ansible plugin. simply navigate to Plugin Manager (as a Jenkins administrator) and select Ansible plugin from the Available plugins tab and install the plugin."

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