What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Ansible, provides the steps you need for your very first installation of Ansible, and explains how to get up and running with this powerful form of automation.
Chapter 2, Understanding the Fundamentals of Ansible, explores the Ansible framework, gives you a sound understanding of the fundamentals of the Ansible language, and explains how to work with the various command-line tools that it comprises.
Chapter 3, Defining Your Inventory, gives you details about the Ansible inventory, its purpose, and how to create your own inventories and work with them. It also explores the differences between static and dynamic inventories, and when to leverage each type.
Chapter 4, Playbooks and Roles, provides you with an in-depth look at creating your own automation code in Ansible in the form of playbooks, and how to enable effective reuse of that code through roles.
Chapter 5, Creating and Consuming Modules, teaches you about Ansible modules and their purpose, and then provides you with the steps required to write your own module, and even to submit it to the Ansible project for inclusion.
Chapter 6, Creating and Consuming Collections, explores Ansible Collections, covering their design, intention, and why they are essential to the future of Ansible. We then proceed to guide you through the creation and consumption of your own collection to give you first-hand experience.
Chapter 7, Creating and Consuming Plugins, explains the purpose of Ansible plugins, and covers the various types of plugins that Ansible uses. It then explains how to write your own plugins, and explains how to submit your code to the Ansible project.
Chapter 8, Coding Best Practices, provides an in-depth look at the best practices that you should adhere to while writing Ansible automation code to ensure that your solutions are manageable, easy to maintain, and easy to scale.
Chapter 9, Advanced Ansible Topics, explores some of the more advanced Ansible options and language directives, which are valuable in a scenario such as performing a roll-out to a highly available cluster. It also explains how to work with jump hosts to automate tasks on secure networks, and how to encrypt your variable data at rest.
Chapter 10, Network Automation with Ansible, provides a detailed look at the importance of network automation, explains why Ansible is especially well suited to this task, and takes you through practical examples of how to connect to a variety of network devices with Ansible.
Chapter 11, Container and Cloud Management, explores the manner in which Ansible supports working with both cloud and container platforms and teaches you how to build containers with Ansible, along with methods to deploy infrastructure as code in a cloud environment using Ansible.
Chapter 12, Troubleshooting and Testing Strategies, teaches you how to test and debug your Ansible code, and gives you robust strategies to handle errors and unexpected failures both with playbooks and the agentless connections on which Ansible relies.
Chapter 13, Getting Started with Ansible Automation Controller, provides an introduction to Ansible Automation Controller and its upstream open source counterpart, AWX, demonstrating how this powerful tool provides a valuable complement to Ansible, especially in large, multi-user environments such as enterprises.
Chapter 14, Execution Environment, provides an introduction to Execution Environments, demonstrating how to create them, how to share them, and how to use them both on the command line and within Ansible Automation Controller.