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

Storing remote host information – inventory best practices

Managed nodes or remote host information is critical data in Ansible automation since, without the proper host details, Ansible will not be able to execute the automation tasks. You learned about the Ansible inventory and its basic details in Chapter 1, Ansible Automation – Introduction. In Chapter 4, Exploring Collaboration in Automation Development, you learned about the importance of storing an inventory in a GitHub repository for version control and better management. If your managed nodes are hosted in cloud platforms, then it is a best practice to use Ansible dynamic inventories, as you learned in Chapter 5, Expanding Your Automation Landscape.

Using meaningful hostnames

When you create your Ansible static inventory files, use meaningful and user-friendly names for your managed nodes instead of complex Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs) or IP addresses. It will help you while executing the Ansible...