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

Integrating Jenkins with AAP

Jenkins (https://www.jenkins.io) is a well-known open source tool (written in the Java programming language) that can be used to implement continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and deployment solutions. Automating the build and deployment is the key to effective DevOps practices. As shown in the following diagram, developers and testers can offload such tasks to CI/CD tools such as Jenkins:

Figure 12.37 – CI/CD workflow using Jenkins

Jenkins can execute many tasks natively or use plugins but for complex tasks, Jenkins can utilize the appropriate tools. For example, instead of calling complex scripts or commands inside the Jenkins pipeline, a specific job can be offloaded to the Ansible automation controller, as shown in the following diagram:

Figure 12.38 – Jenkins integration with AAP for database operations

The automation controller will execute the job based on the parameters...