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 Automation Services Catalog

Automation Services Catalog (ASC) is a frontend for users to the Automation controller. It is designed for business users that may not realize that they are using Ansible Automation. It allows users to order jobs and fill in surveys for job templates and workflows through a friendly user interface. This chapter will go into the details of what exactly ASC is, how to configure the various parts of it, how to create orders and products for users to consume, and how to use approval workflows.

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

  • What is Automation services catalog?
  • Configuring ASC
  • Approvals inside ASC