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 remote connection methods

By default, Ansible communicates with the remote machine using the SSH protocol (native OpenSSH), as you learned previously in this book. For remote nodes, which do not have SSH server options, it is possible to use other connection methods such as WinRM for Microsoft Windows remote machines or httpapi for API-based remote devices (such as Cisco NXAPI and Arista eAPI).

The following diagram shows the different connection methods used by Ansible for automating different devices and platforms:

Figure 6.1 – Connection methods used by Ansible

You can find the available Ansible connection plugins by using the ansible-doc command, as follows:

Figure 6.2 – Ansible connection plugins

Ansible Inventory and Connection Parameters

Refer to https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/intro_inventory.html#connecting-to-hosts-behavioral-inventory-parametersfor specific connection parameters...