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

Ansible module return values


Return values are the key feature for monitoring and managing task execution. An administrator can determine the status of each action and run other tasks accordingly, either to fix, improve, or follow up on the bigger job. Ansible modules are fitted with a variety of return values. Each module will have the common values and some extra specific ones for the role performed by the module. These extra return values can be used for numerous functionalities. In Ansible, most return values are used as input for playbook conditions and loops. This scripting allows the pipelining of actions and tasks to achieve an automated configuration management. Ansible basically collects all the useful output data about the action performed by the module and arranges it into variables presented as return values.

Note

There is no need to learn all the return values of these modules; you can easily get very good documentation about each module using the ansible-doc command. Alternatively...