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

Ansible credentials best practices

Ansible supports multiple credentials and authentication methods, such as username and password, SSH keys, API tokens, webhooks, and even the ability to create custom credentials. You should use a simple authentication mechanism as a starting point, but you need to consider the best practices to ensure security and safety are in place.

Avoid using default admin user accounts

It is common for engineers to configure the default administrator accounts as a remote_user such as root in Linux or as an administrator in Microsoft Windows. This is not a best practice; you should create dedicated accounts for Ansible and configure them for managed nodes.

Split the login credentials for environments and nodes

In the previous examples, you created user accounts in Linux and Microsoft Windows for Ansible to log in and execute tasks. It is possible to create the same user account for all of your nodes, but this is not required or recommended. It is...