Book Image

Ansible Quick Start Guide

By : Mohamed Alibi
Book Image

Ansible Quick Start Guide

By: Mohamed Alibi

Overview of this book

Configuration Management (CM) tools help administrators reduce their workload. Ansible is one of the best Configuration Management tools, and can act as an orchestrator for managing other CMs. This book is the easiest way to learn how to use Ansible as an orchestrator and a Configuration Management tool. With this book, you will learn how to control and monitor computer and network infrastructures of any size,physical or virtual. You will begin by learning about the Ansible client-server architecture. To get started, you will set up and configure an Ansible server. You will then go through the major features of Ansible: Playbook and Inventory. Then, we will look at Ansible systems and network modules. You will then use Ansible to enable infrastructure automated configuration management, followed by best practices for using Ansible roles and community modules. Finally, you will explore Ansible features such as Ansible Vault, Ansible Containers, and Ansible plugins.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 3. Ansible Inventory and Playbook

Now that we have Ansible installed, we can move on to the next milestone. We are now going to explore two major features: Ansible inventory, for client host organization, and Ansible playbooks, to demonstrate how to write Ansible play scripts. These two functionalities combined are the foundation for Ansible's automation and orchestration. This chapter will cover how to use Ansible for quick commands or modules. We will also look at how to use its inventory to identify and configure hosts' access and group them either statically or dynamically. Finally, we will introduce Ansible playbook and look at its actions, its handler, and its variables. We will cover the following topics:

  • Using simple Ansible commands with manually set hosts
  • Setting up our first Ansible static inventory
  • Setting up and configuring a group inventory
  • Setting up and configuring a dynamic inventory
  • Ansible playbook overview and usage
  • Ansible playbook best practices
  • Advanced Ansible playbook...