Book Image

Learn Ansible

By : Russ McKendrick
Book Image

Learn Ansible

By: Russ McKendrick

Overview of this book

Ansible has grown from a small, open source orchestration tool to a full-blown orchestration and configuration management tool owned by Red Hat. Its powerful core modules cover a wide range of infrastructures, including on-premises systems and public clouds, operating systems, devices, and services—meaning it can be used to manage pretty much your entire end-to-end environment. Trends and surveys say that Ansible is the first choice of tool among system administrators as it is so easy to use. This end-to-end, practical guide will take you on a learning curve from beginner to pro. You'll start by installing and configuring the Ansible to perform various automation tasks. Then, we'll dive deep into the various facets of infrastructure, such as cloud, compute and network infrastructure along with security. By the end of this book, you'll have an end-to-end understanding of Ansible and how you can apply it to your own environments.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we have taken our first steps with Ansible by installing locally and then, using Vagrant, launching a virtual machine to interact with. We learned about basic host inventory files and we used the Ansible command to execute a single task against our virtual machine.

We then looked at playbooks, starting out with a basic playbook that returned some information on our target before then progressing to a playbook that updates all of the installed operating system packages before installing and configuring the NTP service.

In the next chapter, we are going to take a look at other Ansible commands we can use.