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

Using job slicing to slice a job template into multiple jobs

In the Job template options for the GUI, modules, and roles section, a particular option came up for job_slice_count. This specific feature takes a regular job template and creates a brand-new workflow with the jobs that equal the number of job slices. We can see an example of this in Figure 10.8, which shows how a job template with a job_slice_count value of 3 is split into three jobs:

Figure 10.8 – A sliced job template

This is useful for jobs that act on a large number of hosts, as it splits them up among execution nodes. Depending on the number of nodes available, the number of hosts, and the tasks performed in the job, this can decrease the amount of time it takes to execute a job and make it more efficient.

Using a large number of slices is not recommended, as it can adversely affect the job scheduler. The recommended number of slices to use is either equal to or less than the number...