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)

Multi-operating system considerations

Looking at each of the core Ansible modules used in the three roles, stack-install, stack-config, and wordpress, we are using a few that will not work on our newly introduced Ubuntu box. Let's quickly work through each one and see what we need to take into account when targeting two very different operating systems:

  • yum: The yum module is the package manager used for Red Hat-based machines such as CentOS, as Ubuntu is based on Debian, which uses apt. We will need to break out the parts of our playbook that uses the yum module to use the apt module instead.
  • yum_repository: As mentioned, we will need to use an apt equivalent module, which is apt_repository.
  • user: The user module works pretty much the same on both operating systems, as we are not giving our user escalated privileges. There aren't any special considerations we need...