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

Playbooks are the lifeblood of Ansible automation, providing a robust framework within which to define logical collections of tasks and handle error conditions cleanly and robustly. The addition of roles into this mix is valuable in terms of not only organizing your code but also in terms of supporting code reuse as your automation requirements grow. Ansible playbooks provide a truly complete automation solution for your technology needs.

In this chapter, you learned about the playbook framework and how to start building your own playbooks. You then learned how to organize your code into roles and design your code to effectively and efficiently support reuse. We then explored some of the more advanced playbook writing topics, such as working with conditional logic, blocks, and loops. Finally, we looked at playbook execution strategies, especially with a view to being able to debug our playbooks effectively, and we wrapped up with a look at how we can run Ansible playbooks...