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 ansible-pull

Of course, the ideal way to work with Ansible code is to store it in a version control repository. This is a valuable step that ensures all changes are tracked, and that everyone responsible for automation is working from the same code. However, it also presents an inefficiency – end users must remember to check out (or pull) the latest version of the code and then execute it, and while this isn’t difficult, manual tasks are both the enemy of efficiency and make it easy for errors to occur. Luckily, once again, Ansible supports us by providing tooling to ensure the most efficient approach can be achieved, and a special command called ansible-pull can be used to both retrieve the latest code from a Git repository and execute it, all using one command. This supports not only greater efficiency for end users (and reduces the chance of human error) but also enables automation jobs to be run unattended (for example, using a scheduler such as cron).

An...