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

Creating and Consuming Collections

If you were familiar with Ansible releases before 2.9, so far, much of this book will have looked very familiar to you. If you’re a newcomer to the world of Ansible automation, then, of course, all of this will look new and shiny. Regardless of your experience with Ansible to date, no book on this would be complete without an in-depth look at collections. Collections are the solution to the problems that started to manifest as a result of Ansible’s own popularity and success, and they are now at the heart of every modern Ansible installation. Whether you realized it or not, you’ve been working with them throughout this book so far, and they are here to stay, so it benefits us to take a deep dive into them.

In this chapter, we will explore collections in depth, looking in more detail at the problem that they solve and how they came about, before taking a more technical look at their structure and makeup. We will conclude the...