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

Understanding the playbook framework

A playbook allows you to manage multiple configurations and complex deployments on many machines simply and easily. This is one of the key benefits of using Ansible for the delivery of complex applications. With playbooks, you can organize your tasks in a logical structure, as tasks are (generally) executed in the order they are written, allowing you to have a good deal of control over your automation processes. With that said, it is possible to perform tasks asynchronously, so where tasks are not executed in sequence, we will highlight this. Our goal is that once you complete this chapter, you will understand the best practices to write your own Ansible playbooks.

Although YAML format is easy to read and write, it is very pedantic when it comes to spacing. For example, you cannot use tabs to set indentation even though on the screen a tab and four spaces might look identical – in YAML, they are not. We recommend that you adopt an editor...