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

Summary

Ansible automation projects often start out small, but as people come to realize the power and simplicity of Ansible, both the code and the inventories tend to grow at an exponential pace (at least in my experience). It is important that in the push for greater automation, the Ansible automation code and the infrastructure itself don’t become another headache. By embedding a few good practices early on and applying them consistently throughout your automation journey with Ansible, you will find that managing your Ansible automation is easy and is a true benefit to your technology infrastructure.

In this chapter, you learned new ways of differentiating environments by OS type, as well as more about variable precedence and how to leverage it when working with host and group variables. You then explored the importance of the top-level playbook, before looking at how to make use of version control tools to manage your automation code. Finally, you explored the new techniques...