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

Connecting to remote nodes

It is the best practice to use dynamic inventories to avoid frequent changes in static inventory files. However, this depends on your environment. It is also a best practice to separate inventory files based on environment, criticality, or other parameters. The following screenshot shows sample inventory files based on the workload environment. As you can see, there are different directories and files for production, development, and staging devices:

Figure 2.22 – Ansible inventory separation based on environment

You need to ensure that the Ansible control node to managed nodes connection is safe and secure. For Linux/Unix managed nodes, use the ssh connection (which is the default connection method) with key-based authentication, as explained in Chapter 1's, Configuring Your Managed Nodes section. There might be cases where you cannot use SSH keys. In that case, you can use encrypted passwords with a username for authentication...