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

Using Ansible as an IaC tool for AWS

In this section, you will create Ansible content to provision and manage AWS resources using Ansible. Let’s assume that whenever you need to create a new EC2 instance, you need to follow multiple manual procedures such as creating a new Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), a new security group, network access policies, and many other items. You also need to do post-provisioning steps such as creating new user accounts, installing packages, configuring applications, and more.

With the help of the Ansible AWS collection, it is possible to automate all of these tasks and manage the entire life cycle of the infrastructure.

AWS Free Tier

To practice AWS and Ansible use cases, it is possible to use AWS Free Tier, which provides more than 100 AWS resources free of charge. Visit https://aws.amazon.com/free (Figure 7.25) and sign up for a free AWS Free Tier account to find them:

Figure 7.25 – AWS Free Tier access with...