Book Image

Ansible Playbook Essentials

By : Gourav Shah, GOURAV JAWAHAR SHAH
Book Image

Ansible Playbook Essentials

By: Gourav Shah, GOURAV JAWAHAR SHAH

Overview of this book

Ansible Playbook Essentials will show you how to write a blueprint of your infrastructure, encompassing multitier applications using Ansible's playbooks. Beginning with basic concepts such as plays, tasks, handlers, inventory, and YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML) syntax that Ansible uses, you'll understand how to organize your code into a modular structure. Building on this, you will study techniques to create data-driven playbooks with variables, templates, logical constructs, and encrypted data, which will further strengthen your application skills in Ansible. Adding to this, the book will also take you through advanced clustering concepts, such as discovering topology information about other nodes in the cluster and managing multiple environments with isolated configurations. As you approach the concluding chapters, you can expect to learn about orchestrating infrastructure and deploying applications in a coordinated manner. By the end of this book, you will be able to design solutions to your automation and orchestration problems using playbooks quickly and efficiently.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Ansible Playbook Essentials
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Setting Up the Learning Environment
References
Index

Summary


In this chapter, you learned how to discover information about other nodes in the cluster to connect them together. We started with the introduction to magic variables and looked at the most commonly used ones. We then started creating a role for haproxy, which auto-discovers web servers and creates configurations dynamically. Finally, we looked at the issue of accessing information about hosts not in the playbook, and you learned how to solve it by enabling the caching of facts. Magic variables are very powerful, especially while orchestrating your infrastructure with Ansible, where discovering topology information automatically is very useful.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to securely pass data using vault, an encrypted data store.