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 CI/CD to Interact with Automation Controller

Previous chapters have gone into detail about using roles and modules to interact with parts of the Ansible Automation Platform (AAP). This chapter will go into detail about using principles of Configuration as Code (CaC) and Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to maintain configuration and interact with services in the AAP. Some of this has been covered in other chapters, such as triggering a project update, a configuration change, when a pull request has been completed, or doing a regular backup of the installation. The goal of this chapter is to put those ideas together in a more cohesive format with examples of how to integrate those examples into CI/CD.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

  • A brief introduction to CI/CD pipelines and webhooks
  • Maintaining Automation controller and hub through infrastructure as code paired with CI/CD
  • Launching jobs, monitoring...