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

Modules are the very lifeblood of Ansible – without them, Ansible could not perform all of the complex and varied tasks it performs so well across a wide variety of systems. By being an open source project, it is incredibly easy to extend the functionality of Ansible by yourself, and in this chapter, we explored how you can, with a little Python knowledge, write a custom module from scratch. Ansible is, at the time of writing, incredibly feature-rich, but this ease of customization and extension makes Ansible virtually limitless in terms of its potential, especially given the power and popularity of Python as a programming language.

In this chapter, we started with a recap of how to execute multiple modules using the command line. We then explored the process of interrogating the current module index, as well as how to obtain documentation about modules to evaluate their suitability for our needs, regardless of whether we have an active internet connection or not...