Book Image

Ansible for Real-Life Automation

By : Gineesh Madapparambath
Book Image

Ansible for Real-Life Automation

By: Gineesh Madapparambath

Overview of this book

Get ready to leverage the power of Ansible’s wide applicability to automate and manage IT infrastructure with Ansible for Real-Life Automation. This book will guide you in setting up and managing the free and open source automation tool and remote-managed nodes in the production and dev/staging environments. Starting with its installation and deployment, you’ll learn automation using simple use cases in your workplace. You’ll go beyond just Linux machines to use Ansible to automate Microsoft Windows machines, network devices, and private and public cloud platforms such as VMWare, AWS, and GCP. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll integrate Ansible into your DevOps workflow and deal with application container management and container platforms such as Kubernetes. This Ansible book also contains a detailed introduction to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to help you get up to speed with Red Hat AAP and integration with CI/CD and ITSM. What’s more, you’ll implement efficient automation solutions while learning best practices and methods to secure sensitive data using Ansible Vault and alternatives to automate non-supported platforms and operations using raw commands, command modules, and REST API calls. By the end of this book, you’ll be proficient in identifying and developing real-life automation use cases using Ansible.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: Using Ansible as Your Automation Tool
6
Part 2: Finding Use Cases and Integrations
16
Part 3: Managing Your Automation Development Flow with Best Practices

Automating a password reset using ITSM and Ansible

With the help of ITSM tools and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (or community Ansible AWX), it is possible to implement zero-touch automation use cases such as database user password resets, database provisioning, and so on. Users will interact with the ITSM tool, and the tool will interact with Ansible Automation Platform to implement the task implementation, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 8.34 – ITSM and Ansible Automation Platform integration for database operations

This programmatic automation is one of the best features of Ansible and helps organizations scale their automation landscape by integrating with existing tools and software.

Use customized forms or ticketing systems in the ITSM tool, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 8.35 – Jira ticket and its details

The ITSM tool, such as Jira or ServiceNow, can also be configured with custom...