Book Image

Learn Ansible

By : Russ McKendrick
Book Image

Learn Ansible

By: Russ McKendrick

Overview of this book

Ansible has grown from a small, open source orchestration tool to a full-blown orchestration and configuration management tool owned by Red Hat. Its powerful core modules cover a wide range of infrastructures, including on-premises systems and public clouds, operating systems, devices, and services—meaning it can be used to manage pretty much your entire end-to-end environment. Trends and surveys say that Ansible is the first choice of tool among system administrators as it is so easy to use. This end-to-end, practical guide will take you on a learning curve from beginner to pro. You'll start by installing and configuring the Ansible to perform various automation tasks. Then, we'll dive deep into the various facets of infrastructure, such as cloud, compute and network infrastructure along with security. By the end of this book, you'll have an end-to-end understanding of Ansible and how you can apply it to your own environments.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

The VPC playbook

The first thing we need to discuss is how we can pass our access key ID and also the secret access key to Ansible in a safe and secure way. As I will be sharing the final playbooks in a public repository on GitHub, I do not want to share my AWS keys with the world as that could get expensive! Typically, if it were a private repository, I would use Ansible Vault to encrypt the keys and include them in there with other potentially sensitive data such as deployment keys and so on.

In this case, I don't want to include any encrypted information in the repository as it would mean that people would need to unencrypt it, edit the values, and then re-encrypt it. Luckily, the AWS modules provided by Ansible allows you to set two environment variables on your Ansible controller; those variables will then be read as part of the playbook execution.

To set the variables...