Book Image

Mastering Ansible, 4th Edition - Fourth Edition

By : James Freeman, Jesse Keating
Book Image

Mastering Ansible, 4th Edition - Fourth Edition

By: James Freeman, Jesse Keating

Overview of this book

Ansible is a modern, YAML-based automation tool (built on top of Python, one of the world’s most popular programming languages) with a massive and ever-growing user base. Its popularity and Python underpinnings make it essential learning for all in the DevOps space. This fourth edition of Mastering Ansible provides complete coverage of Ansible automation, from the design and architecture of the tool and basic automation with playbooks to writing and debugging your own Python-based extensions. You'll learn how to build automation workflows with Ansible’s extensive built-in library of collections, modules, and plugins. You'll then look at extending the modules and plugins with Python-based code and even build your own collections — ultimately learning how to give back to the Ansible community. By the end of this Ansible book, you'll be confident in all aspects of Ansible automation, from the fundamentals of playbook design to getting under the hood and extending and adapting Ansible to solve new automation challenges.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Ansible Overview and Fundamentals
7
Section 2: Writing and Troubleshooting Ansible Playbooks
13
Section 3: Orchestration with Ansible

Summary

Deployment and upgrade strategies are a matter of taste. Each strategy comes with distinct advantages and disadvantages. Ansible does not declare an opinion about which is better, and therefore it is well suited to perform deployments and upgrades regardless of the strategy. Ansible provides features and design patterns that facilitate a variety of styles with ease. Understanding the nature of each strategy and how Ansible can be tuned for that strategy will empower you to decide on and design deployments for each of your applications. Task controls and built-in variables provide methods to efficiently upgrade large-scale applications while treating specific tasks carefully.

In this chapter, you learned how to use Ansible to perform in-place upgrades and some different methodologies for these, including techniques such as expanding and contracting an environment. You learned about failing fast to ensure that playbooks don't cause extensive damage if an early part of...