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

Surveys for job templates and workflows, and how to use them

Surveys are a way to capture user input for job templates and workflows. Each question has a set variable that is populated for use by playbooks. This is also useful when users are using the API, roles, or modules. Surveys allow users to input fields as extra variables into the job. When using only surveys this limits users to only the extra variables defined in the survey. Those fields must match the data type set in the survey, which adds a level of data validation. With that capability in mind, the next section reviews how to define surveys.

Survey definitions

The top-level options for surveys in modules and roles for job templates and workflows are the following (survey_spec):

  • name: The name of the survey – this does not show up in the GUI.
  • description: The description of the survey – this does not show up in the GUI.
  • spec: A list of survey questions.

All three of these are required...