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

Exploring container-focused modules

Often, when organizations grow, they start to use multiple technologies in different parts of the organization. Another thing that usually happens is that after a department has found that a vendor worked well for them, they will be more inclined to try new technologies offered by that vendor. A mix of those two factors and time (usually, fewer technology cycles) will end up creating multiple solutions for the same problem within the same organization.

If your organization is in this situation with containers, Ansible can come to the rescue, thanks to its ability to interoperate with the majority of, if not all, container platforms.

Often, the biggest obstacle to doing something with Ansible is finding the name of the modules you need to use to achieve what you want to achieve. In this section, we will try to help in this effort, mainly in terms of the containerization space, but this might help you in the quest to find different kinds of modules...