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 plugins


In this section, we are going to briefly introduce Ansible plugins and talk about how we can develop our own.

What are Ansible plugins?

Ansible plugins are pieces of code and functions that add to Ansible's original core functionalities. These plugins enable Ansible to control several APIs and tools that enable the correct functioning of several modules.

The default installation of Ansible includes several essential plugins, which are shown in the following list:

  • Action plugins: These are frontend plugins for the modules. They can execute actions on the master host before calling the modules themselves.
  • Cache plugins: These are background plugins that are used to cache host facts. This can help with optimizing fact gathering.
  • Callback plugins: These help the monitoring and log collection tools to work with Ansible for optimized monitoring.
  • Connection plugins: These are responsible for communication with remote hosts that support different types of connections.
  • Inventory plugins:...