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

Introduction to Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a method that’s used to provision and manage infrastructure details and configurations as software code and make changes inside the code instead of changing the infrastructure whenever required. There are many dedicated tools and software for IaC, including Ansible. Instead of manually deploying the infrastructure components, such as virtual machines, storage, network, policies, and so on, it is possible to develop IaC and use tools to deploy the infrastructure automatically. The following diagram shows some typical IaC components regarding the following:

  • Infrastructure component details will be stored as code in a specific format (for example, YAML playbooks).
  • IaC tools (for example, Ansible) will create and manage the infrastructure component in the private or public cloud based on the infrastructure code:

Figure 7.1 – Typical Infrastructure as Code components...