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

Creating Inventory, and Other Inventory Pieces

Inventories describe what is being acted upon in the Automation controller. Job templates target hosts and groups that reside in inventories. Almost every company has a different way of storing the source of truth (SOT) when it comes to an inventory of devices. This chapter will go into the details of managing inventories, from adding them from files to interacting with outside services to populate the host and groups that the controller references.

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

  • Creating an inventory
  • Using inventory sources
  • Using base Ansible inventory plugins
  • Using built-in automation controller inventory plugins
  • Using other popular inventory plugins
  • Writing your own inventory plugin