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

Securing data with Ansible Vault

Ansible Vault is a tool included with Ansible that allows you to encrypt your sensitive data at rest, while also using it in a playbook. Often, it is necessary to store login credentials or other sensitive data in a variable to allow a playbook to run unattended. However, this risks exposing your data to people who might use it with malicious intent. Fortunately, Ansible Vault secures your data at rest using AES-256 encryption, meaning your sensitive data is safe from prying eyes.

Let’s proceed with a simple example that shows you how you can use Ansible Vault:

  1. Start by creating a new vault to store sensitive data in; we will call this file secret.yml. You can create this using the following command:
    $ ansible-vault create secret.yml
    New Vault password:
    Confirm New Vault password:

Enter the password you have chosen for the vault when prompted and confirm it by entering it a second time (the vault that accompanies this book on...