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

Discovering the plugin types

Ansible’s code has always been designed to be modular—indeed, this is one of its core strengths. Whether that is through the use of modules to perform tasks or through plugins (as we will see shortly), Ansible’s modular design allows it to be as versatile and powerful as it has demonstrated itself to be so far in this book. As with modules, Ansible plugins are all written in Python and are expected to ingest and return data in a certain well-defined format (more on this later). Ansible’s plugins are often invisible in their function in that you rarely call them by name in your commands or playbooks, yet they are responsible for some of the most important features Ansible has to offer, including SSH connectivity, the ability to parse inventory files (in INI format, YAML, or otherwise), and the ability to run jinja2 filters on your data.

As ever, let’s validate the presence of a suitably installed version of Ansible on...