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

Technical requirements

Although there are a couple of ways to install AWX, we are going to use the suggested AWX installation, which is the operator-based one. For this reason, you will need to have a Kubernetes cluster available.

The easiest way to have one on your machine is to use minikube.

On Linux machines, it is enough to download it from GitHub (https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube) and run it with the following command:

minikube start --cpus=4 --memory=6g --addons=ingress

In the next section, we will use the kubectl command. To have it available using minikube, you will need to execute the following:

alias kubectl="minikube kubectl --"

On other operating systems, the process might be different, and I suggest checking minikube’s official documentation (https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/) to see which installation method better suits your platform and needs.

Although we will give specific examples of hostnames in this chapter, you are...