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

Seamless automation integration with Azure

Another global cloud that Ansible can manage is Microsoft Azure.

Azure integration, like AWS integration, requires quite a few steps to be performed in Playbooks.

The first thing you will need to do is set up the authentication so that Ansible is allowed to control your Azure account.

Installation

To let Ansible manage the Azure cloud, you need to install the Azure SDK for Python. Do this by executing the following command:

$ pip install -r ~/.ansible/collections/ansible_collections/azure/azcollection/requirements-azure.txt

We can now proceed to install the Azure collection:

$ ansible-galaxy collection install azure.azcollection

Now that you have all the dependencies present, you can start the authentication process.

Authentication

There are different ways to ensure that Ansible is able to manage Azure for you, based on the way your Azure account is set up, but they can all be configured in the ~/.azure/credentials...