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 job templates

This section will go over job template creation. Job templates are the heart of the Automation controller. Everything is built around them, which is one of the reasons they have the most options; at last count, they had almost 40.

Job templates control how playbooks run. They control which hosts are used, variables are included, and the how a job behaves when run. This can seem daunting. However, most of the options are optional; they are knobs to turn and use as needed.

At the same time, a job template is meant to be a template to run the same thing many times. While things such as surveys and variable inputs can change how a particular playbook runs, there is no reason why a playbook can’t be used in multiple job templates.

In Ansible, there are always multiple ways to achieve the same goal. This applies to job templates as well. Throughout this chapter and the next chapter, with workflows and job templates, there are various strategies for...