Book Image

Demystifying Ansible Automation Platform

By : Sean Sullivan
Book Image

Demystifying Ansible Automation Platform

By: Sean Sullivan

Overview of this book

While you can use any automation software to simplify task automation, scaling automation to suit your growing business needs becomes difficult using only a command-line tool. Ansible Automation Platform standardizes how automation is deployed, initiated, delegated, and audited, and this comprehensive guide shows you how you can simplify and scale its management. The book starts by taking you through the ways to get Ansible Automation Platform installed, their pros and cons, and the initial configuration. You’ll learn about each object in the platform, how it interacts with other objects, as well as best practices for defining and managing objects to save time. You’ll see how to maintain the created pieces with infrastructure as code. As you advance, you’ll monitor workflows with CI/CD playbooks and understand how Ansible Automation Platform integrates with many other services such as GitLab and GitHub. By the end of this book, you’ll have worked through real-world examples to make the most of the platform while learning how to manipulate, manage, and deploy any playbook to Ansible Automation Platform.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Ansible Automation Platform Up and Running
6
Part 2: Configuring AAP
13
Part 3: Extending Ansible Tower

Creating and modifying your execution environments

The EEs that come with Ansible Automation Platform can perform most general tasks, though some collections have different Python or system requirements that aren’t included in a base container image.

To allow anyone to create an EE, the Ansible Builder tool was introduced. This tool takes a definition file and creates an EE.

Creating a definition file

The definition file is made up of four sections, as follows:

  • Base section: This is where the base variables are set.
  • Build arguments section: This is where the build arguments are set.
  • Dependencies section: This is where definitions for dependencies are set.
  • Build steps section: This is where additional build arguments are set.

To follow along, a base execution file has been created in this chapter’s files:

//base/base_execution_enviroment.yml
---
version: 1
build_arg_defaults:
  EE_BASE_IMAGE: 'ah.node/ee-minimal...