Book Image

Ansible Quick Start Guide

By : Mohamed Alibi
Book Image

Ansible Quick Start Guide

By: Mohamed Alibi

Overview of this book

Configuration Management (CM) tools help administrators reduce their workload. Ansible is one of the best Configuration Management tools, and can act as an orchestrator for managing other CMs. This book is the easiest way to learn how to use Ansible as an orchestrator and a Configuration Management tool. With this book, you will learn how to control and monitor computer and network infrastructures of any size,physical or virtual. You will begin by learning about the Ansible client-server architecture. To get started, you will set up and configure an Ansible server. You will then go through the major features of Ansible: Playbook and Inventory. Then, we will look at Ansible systems and network modules. You will then use Ansible to enable infrastructure automated configuration management, followed by best practices for using Ansible roles and community modules. Finally, you will explore Ansible features such as Ansible Vault, Ansible Containers, and Ansible plugins.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Ansible master node installation


Ansible uses Secure Shell (SSH) and WinRM to manage its host clients. All installation happens on either the management node or the master node, or possibly on multiple nodes when redundancy is needed. We will proceed into the installation of Ansible from source, as with Python PyPI on two major Linux families: Debian (which includes Debian, Linux Mint, Kali Linux, Ubuntu, and Ubuntu Mate) and Red Hat (which includes Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, and Scientific Linux). We will also be looking at the Ansible installation process for Mac OS X, Python PyPI, and how to install it from the source. We will cover cloud usage and containerized Ansible.

If you have a choice, we recommend using the default package manager for Red Hat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, and Mac OS X. Using the package manager allows the installation of the latest stable version of Ansible. Python PyPI can also be relied on for its capacity to deliver the latest stable version of Ansible, especially...