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 credential types and credentials

Credentials are the way to store secrets and passwords inside of the Automation controller. What a credential stores and how it can be accessed in a playbook is dictated by what type it is. The controller has 26 built-in credential types, ranging from SSH keys to those designed to interact with secret management systems such as HashiCorp Vault. Some of the built-in credentials are also made to access services such as AWS or Azure.

Credential types

To understand credentials, it is important to look at the underlying credential types. Credential type definitions can be found by navigating to the web page (https://{{controller_fqdn}}/api/v2/credential_types/) of the controller. There is also a playbook to export the credential API definitions in this chapter’s repository (ch05/credentials/credential_types_names.yamland ch05/credentials/credential_types.yaml).

Custom credential types can be especially useful to store global sensitive...