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

Writing your own inventory plugin

While the inventory plugins that have been covered so far cover the most popular services, it is impossible for them to cover every possibility. A good example of this is a SOT that has been custom-built for a team or company. The easiest way to access something like this is through an API. However, it does not have to use an API and can instead make use of Python to access data to build an inventory.

Ansible configuration changes

As discussed, when using collection plugins, a project should have a certain structure to it. In addition, there are advantages to testing to structure it in a particular order. The recommended structure to use is that of the inventory_plugin_creation folder in this chapter’s repository files, as illustrated here:

├── ansible.cfg
├── inventories
│   └── plugin.yml
├── inventory_plugins
│ ...