Book Image

Mastering Ansible. - Third Edition

By : James Freeman, Jesse Keating
Book Image

Mastering Ansible. - Third Edition

By: James Freeman, Jesse Keating

Overview of this book

Automation is essential for success in the modern world of DevOps. Ansible provides a simple, yet powerful, automation engine for tackling complex automation challenges. This book will take you on a journey that will help you exploit the latest version's advanced features to help you increase efficiency and accomplish complex orchestrations. This book will help you understand how Ansible 2.7 works at a fundamental level and will also teach you to leverage its advanced capabilities. Throughout this book, you will learn how to encrypt Ansible content at rest and decrypt data at runtime. Next, this book will act as an ideal resource to help you master the advanced features and capabilities required to tackle complex automation challenges. Later, it will walk you through workflows, use cases, orchestrations, troubleshooting, and Ansible extensions. Lastly, you will examine and debug Ansible operations, helping you to understand and resolve issues. By the end of the book, you will be able to unlock the true power of the Ansible automation engine and tackle complex, real- world actions with ease.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Ansible Overview and Fundamentals
6
Section 2: Writing and Troubleshooting Ansible Playbooks
12
Section 3: Orchestration with Ansible

What this book covers

Chapter 1, The System Architecture and Design of Ansible, looks at the ins and outs of how Ansible goes about performing tasks on behalf of an engineer, how it is designed, and how to work with inventory and variables.

Chapter 2, Protecting Your Secrets with Ansible, explores the tools available to encrypt data at rest and prevent secrets from being revealed at runtime.

Chapter 3, Ansible and Windows - Not Just for Linux, explores the integration of Ansible with Windows hosts to enable automation in cross-platform environments.

Chapter 4, Infrastructure Management for Enterprises with AWX, provides an overview of the powerful open source graphical management framework for Ansible known as AWX, and how this might be employed in an enterprise environment.

Chapter 5, Unlocking the Power of Jinja2 Templates, states the varied uses of the Jinja2 templating engine within Ansible and discusses ways to make the most out of its capabilities.

Chapter 6, Controlling Task Conditions, explains how to change the default behavior of Ansible to customize task error and change conditions.

Chapter 7, Composing Reusable Ansible Content with Roles, explains how to move beyond executing loosely-organized tasks on hosts, and instead to build clean, reusable, and self-contained code structures known as roles to achieve the same end result.

Chapter 8, Troubleshooting Ansible, takes you through the various methods that can be employed to examine, introspect, modify, and debug the operations of Ansible.

Chapter 9, Extending Ansible, covers the various ways in which new capabilities can be added to Ansible via modules, plugins, and inventory sources.

Chapter 10, Minimizing Downtime with Rolling Deployments, explains the common deployment and upgrade strategies in order to showcase the relevant Ansible features.

Chapter 11, Infrastructure Provisioning, examines cloud infrastructure providers and container systems in order to create an infrastructure to manage.

Chapter 12, Network Automation, describes the advancements in the automation of network device configuration using Ansible.