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)

LAMP stack

The LAMP stack is the term used to describe an all-in-one web and database server. Typically, the components are:

  • Linux: The underlying operating system; in our case, we will be using CentOS 7.
  • Apache: The web server element of the stack.
  • MariaDB: The database component of the stack; typically, it is MySQL-based. As CentOS 7 ships with MariaDB, we will be using that rather than PHP.
  • PHP: The dynamic language used by the web server to generate content.

There is also a common variation of the LAMP stack called LEMP; this replaces Apache with NGINX, which is pronounced engine-x, hence the E rather than N.

We are going to be looking at creating roles to deal with these components; these are:

  • common: This role will prepare our CentOS server, installing any supporting packages and services we need
  • apache: This role will install the Apache web server and also configure...