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

That concludes our whistle-stop tour of AWX. In this chapter, we showed that AWX is straightforward to install and configure once you know the core four-step process involved. We also showed how to build on this process with features such as surveys, notifications, and workflows.

You learned that AWX is straightforward to install (in fact, it installs with Ansible!), and how to add SSL encryption to it. You then gained an understanding of how the platform works, and how to go from a fresh install to building out projects, inventories, credentials, and templates to run Ansible jobs. You learned that there are many additional features that build on this. These were covered in the final part of this chapter in order to help you build a robust enterprise management system for Ansible.

In the next chapter, we will return to the Ansible language and look at the benefits of the Jinja2 templating system.