Book Image

Practical Ansible 2

By : Daniel Oh, James Freeman, Fabio Alessandro Locati
Book Image

Practical Ansible 2

By: Daniel Oh, James Freeman, Fabio Alessandro Locati

Overview of this book

Ansible enables you to automate software provisioning, configuration management, and application roll-outs, and can be used as a deployment and orchestration tool. While Ansible provides simple yet powerful features to automate multi-layer environments using agentless communication, it can also solve other critical IT challenges, such as ensuring continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) with zero downtime. In this book, you'll work with Ansible 2.9 and learn to solve complex issues quickly with the help of task-oriented scenarios. You'll start by installing and configuring Ansible on Linux and macOS to automate monotonous and repetitive IT tasks and get to grips with concepts such as playbooks, inventories, and network modules. As you progress, you'll gain insight into the YAML syntax and learn how to port between Ansible versions. In addition to this, you'll also understand how Ansible enables you to orchestrate multi-layer environments such as networks, containers, and the cloud. By the end of this Ansible book, you'll be well - versed in writing playbooks and other related Ansible code to overcome just about all of your IT challenges, from infrastructure-as-code provisioning to application deployments, and even handling the mundane day-to-day maintenance tasks that take up so much valuable time.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Learning the Fundamentals of Ansible
6
Section 2: Expanding the Capabilities of Ansible
11
Section 3: Using Ansible in an Enterprise

Summary

Ansible has many advanced features that allow you to run your playbooks in a variety of scenarios, whether that is upgrading a cluster of servers in a controlled manner; working with devices on a secure, isolated network; or controlling your playbook flow with prompts and tags. Ansible has been adopted by a large and ever-growing user base and, as such, is designed and evolved around solving real-world problems. Most of the advanced features of Ansible we discussed are centered around exactly this—solving real-world problems.

In this chapter, you learned about running tasks asynchronously in Ansible, before looking at the various features available for running playbooks to upgrade a cluster, such as running tasks on small batches of inventory hosts, failing a play early if a certain percentage of hosts fail, delegating tasks to a specific host, and even running...