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 execution environments in Ansible Automation Controller

Using Ansible execution environments in Ansible Automation Controller is very straightforward, since it always uses an execution environment while executing Playbooks. The only difference is whether it is the default execution environment or the one that you built and specified.

The first thing we will need to do is add a new execution environment to Ansible Automation Controller or AWX. To do so, you need to go to execution environments in the navigation bar in the Administration section, and then click on the Add button. You can now fill in the name and the image URL and select Always pull container before running. as the Pull option, as follows:

Figure 14.1 – Creating a new execution environment window

Figure 14.1 – Creating a new execution environment window

After saving the execution environment by pressing Save, you can go to Templates in the navigation bar under Resources and create a new job template, or modify the one you already...