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)

Manufacturer and device support

So far, we have been looking at modules that interact with servers. In our case, they have all been running locally. In later chapters, we will be communicating with remotely hosted servers. Before we start interacting with remote servers, we should cover the core network modules.

These modules have all been designed to interact with and manage the configuration of various network devices, from traditional top-of-rack switches and fully virtualized network infrastructure, to firewalls and load balancers. There are quite a lot of very different devices supported by Ansible, from open source virtual appliances all the way through to solutions that can potentially cost over $500,000, depending on your configuration.

The modules

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