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

Automating with Amazon Web Services

In many organizations, cloud providers are used widely, while in others, they are just being introduced. However, in one way or another, you will probably have to deal with a cloud provider while doing your job. AWS is the biggest and oldest, and is perhaps something you will have to work with.

Installation

To be able to use Ansible to automate your AWS estate, you’ll need to install the boto3 library. To do so, run the following command:

$ pip install boto3

As for collections, at the moment, there are two collections to interact with AWS services: community.aws and amazon.aws. In many cases, you will need both of them, since many features of the former have not yet been implemented in the latter:

$ ansible-galaxy collection install community.aws amazon.aws

Now that you have all the necessary software installed, you can set up authentication.

Authentication

The boto library looks up the necessary credentials in the ~...