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

Using Vault credentials in the Ansible Automation Platform

When you run your playbooks from the Web UI of the automation controller, then you have similar options to provide the Vault secret from the WebUI. We can either keep the Vault secret inside a Vault credential or we can select the Prompt on launch option. The latter involves interactive input (such as --ask-vault-password in the Ansible command-line execution) and will prompt for the Vault secret when you execute the Job Template from the automation controller’s WebUI.

The Ansible automation controller

The Ansible automation controller is the control plane for the Ansible Automation Platform (AAP). When you migrate to AAP 2, the automation controller will be upgraded to include Ansible Tower. Refer to Chapter 12, Integrating Ansible with Your Tools, for more details.

In the following section, we will learn how to create Vault credentials in the Ansible automation controller GUI and attach them to the Job Template...