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

Key differences between upstream and official Red Hat products

Earlier, we briefly mentioned upstream projects. The key ones are AWX and Galaxy_ng. These projects are built to be bleeding edge regarding rapid changes as developers from both the public and Red Hat make changes and improvements. Things are expected to break, and the upgrade path from one version to another is not guaranteed or tested. Bug fixes are also not backported to previous versions. However, their downstream versions, such as the Automation controller and Automation hub, go through rigorous testing, including testing on upgrading from one version to another. Not all the changes that are made upstream make it to the next release of the downstream product. In addition, most bug fixes do get backported to previous versions.

For these reasons, it is not recommended to use upstream products in production. Because of these caveats, they are fine for a home lab, proof of concept, and development, but not production.