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

Using Ansible to orchestrate OpenStack

As opposed to the various cloud services we just discussed, all of which are public clouds, OpenStack allows you to create your own (private) cloud.

Private clouds have the disadvantage that they expose more complexity to the administrator and the user, but this is the reason they can be customized to suit an organization perfectly.

Installation

The first step to being able to control an OpenStack cluster with Ansible is to ensure that openstacksdk is installed.

To install openstacksdk, you need to execute the following command:

$ pip install openstacksdk

We can now proceed to install the OpenStack collection:

$ ansible-galaxy collection install openstack.cloud

Now that you have installed openstacksdk, you can start the authentication process.

Authentication

Since Ansible will use openstacksdk as its backend, you will need to ensure that openstacksdk is able to connect to the OpenStack cluster.

To do this, you can...