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

Importing and exporting objects into the controller

With objects created inside of the controller, it is important to be able to export and import those objects. This can be used to back up and restore some aspects of the Automation controller as well. However, this method has limitations on what it can export.

I’d personally recommend using Configuration as Code (CaC) to manage objects on Ansible Automation Platform. Users with existing deployments need a way to move objects to definition files in order to move to a CaC model. Using the export methods described in this section facilitates the move to CaC.

The modules used to export require an underlying Python module, which can be installed using the following command:

$ pip install awxkit

This allows for either the awx.awx or ansible.controller collection import and export modules to act on objects from the API.

Currently, this is limited to the following controller objects:

  • applications
  • credential_types...