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 Vault


In this section, we are going to introduce the features, use cases, and best practices that are associated with Ansible Vault.

What is Ansible Vault?

Ansible Vault is a tool provided by Ansible that allows its users to encrypt secret variables, which can vary from authentication credentials and keys to sensitive and personal user information. Ansible Vault creates encrypted files to store variables, which can be moved to a secure location if necessary.

Ansible Vault is integrated transparently into the scripts of Ansible roles and playbooks. This means that Vault can encrypt any data structures that are located within those scripts. This includes host and group variables, either stored in the script or from another location imported using the include_vars option. They could also be located in thedefaultsorvarsfolder when dealing with an Ansible role. Vault can also encrypt task files when there is a need to hide the name of a particular variable.

Note

Ansible Vault can also be extended...