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

Summary

Ansible is a powerful and versatile yet simple automation tool, of which the key benefits are its agentless architecture and its simple installation process. Ansible was designed to get you from zero to automation rapidly and with minimal effort, and we have demonstrated the simplicity with which you can get up and running with Ansible in this chapter.

In this chapter, you learned the basics of setting up Ansible—how to install it to control other hosts, and the requirements for nodes being managed by Ansible. You learned about the fundamentals required to set up SSH and WinRM for Ansible automation, as well as how to bootstrap managed nodes to ensure they are suitable for Ansible automation. You also learned about ad hoc commands and their benefits. Finally, you learned how to run the latest version of the code directly from GitHub, which both enables you to contribute directly to the development of Ansible and gives you access to the very latest features should...