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

Controlling access to AWX

In my opinion, one of the biggest advantages of AWX compared to Ansible is the fact that AWX allows multiple users to connect and control/perform actions. This allows a company to have a single AWX installation for different teams, a whole organization, or even multiple organizations.

A role-based access control (RBAC) system is in place to manage the users’ permissions.

Both AWX and Ansible Automation Controller can link to central directories, such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and Azure Active Directory – however, we can also create user accounts locally on the AWX server itself. Let’s start by creating our first user account locally!

Creating a user

One of the big advantages of AWX is the ability to manage multiple users. This allows us to create a user in AWX for each person that is using the AWX system so that we can ensure they are only granted the permissions that they need. Also, by using individual...