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

Connecting to network devices

As we have seen, there are some peculiarities in Ansible networking, so specific configurations are required.

To manage network devices with Ansible, you need to have at least one to test on. Let’s assume we have a Cisco IOS system available to us. It is accepted that not everyone will have such a device to test on, so the following is offered as a hypothetical example only.

Going by the https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/network/user_guide/platform_index.html page, we can see that the correct ansible_network_os for this device is cisco.ios.ios and that we can connect to it using both network_cli and local. Since local is deprecated, we are going to use network_cli. Follow these steps to configure Ansible so that you can manage IOS devices:

  1. First, let’s create the inventory file with our devices in the routers group:
    [routers]
    n1.example.org
    n2.example.org
    [cumulusvx]
    vx01.example.org
  2. To know which connection parameters...