Book Image

Practical Ansible - Second Edition

By : James Freeman, Fabio Alessandro Locati, Daniel Oh
Book Image

Practical Ansible - Second Edition

By: James Freeman, Fabio Alessandro Locati, Daniel Oh

Overview of this book

Ansible empowers you to automate a myriad of tasks, including software provisioning, configuration management, infrastructure deployment, and application rollouts. It can be used as a deployment tool as well as an orchestration tool. While Ansible provides simple yet powerful features to automate multi-layer environments using agentless communication, it can also solve other critical IT challenges, such as ensuring continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) with zero downtime. In this book, you'll work with the latest release of Ansible and learn how to solve complex issues quickly with the help of task-oriented scenarios. You'll start by installing and configuring Ansible on Linux and macOS to automate monotonous and repetitive IT tasks and learn concepts such as playbooks, inventories, and roles. As you progress, you'll gain insight into the YAML syntax and learn how to port between Ansible versions. Additionally, you'll understand how Ansible enables you to orchestrate multi-layer environments such as networks, containers, and the cloud. By the end of this Ansible book, you'll be well versed in writing playbooks and other related Ansible code to overcome all your IT challenges, from infrastructure-as-a-code provisioning to application deployments and handling mundane day-to-day maintenance tasks.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:Learning the Fundamentals of Ansible
6
Part 2:Expanding the Capabilities of Ansible
12
Part 3:Using Ansible in an Enterprise

Porting between Ansible versions

Ansible is a fast-moving project, and with releases and new features added, new modules (and module enhancements) are released and the inevitable bugs that come with the software are fixed. There is no doubt that you will end up writing your code against one version of Ansible only to need to run it on a newer version again at some point. By way of example, when we started writing the second edition, the current release of Ansible was 2.15.

Often, you will find that your code from an earlier version just about works when you upgrade it, but this isn’t always a given. Modules are sometimes deprecated (although usually not without warning) and features do change. You can find more details on the 2.15 release notes here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.15.2/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.15.rst.

So, the question remains—how can you ensure that your playbooks, roles, modules, and plugins still work when you update your Ansible installation...