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

Ansible for network management

Core network devices, such as switches, routers, and firewalls, have long had management interfaces, especially in enterprise environments. Command-Line Interfaces (CLIs) have always been popular on such devices as they support scripting, so, as you have already guessed, they lend themselves extremely well to Ansible automation.

Historically, teams have faced a myriad of challenges when managing these devices, including maintaining configuration, coping with the failure/loss of a device, and obtaining support in the event of an issue. Often, companies found themselves locked into a single network vendor (or at best, a small handful) to enable the use of proprietary tools to manage the network. As with any situation where you are locked into a technology, this carries both benefits and drawbacks. Add to this the complexity of software-defined networks that are rapidly changing and evolving, and the challenge becomes even greater. In this section, we...