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

To get the most out of this book

In this book, I will first guide you through the installation and deployment of the Ansible automation tool, and later, I will explain some real IT use cases and methods to use Ansible for automating such operations. Since the focus of the book is on different automation use cases, some of the chapters might have additional technical requirements, such as basic knowledge of a specific technology or access to a lab environment (such as a Kubernetes cluster). For this, I have also covered the methods to arrange the development environment if you want to practice. Always refer to the Ansible documentation at https://docs.ansible.com and other provided links in the chapters for further learning.

For testing and development, you can get no-cost RHEL (https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-enterprise-linux) subscriptions. It is also possible to replace RHEL8 with other operating systems, such as Fedora, CentOS, or Ubuntu, but you might need to adjust some of the commands and modules in the playbook.

If you are reading a soft copy or digital version of this book, it is advised to type the commands and develop the playbooks by yourself rather than copy-pasting from the book. However, you can access the code, snippets, and playbooks from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section) for reference.