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

Designing and building containers with playbooks

Building containers with Dockerfiles is probably the most common way of doing this, but this does not mean that this is the best way.

First of all, even if you are in a very good place in your automation path and you have a lot of Ansible roles written for your infrastructure, you can't leverage them in Dockerfiles, so you would end up replicating your work to create containers. Aside from the time required to do this and the fact that you need to learn a new language to do so, it is very rare that a company is able to drop all their infrastructure and switch to containers overnight. This means that you need to keep two copies of the same automation section active and up-to-date, thus putting yourself in the position to make mistakes and have inconsistent behaviors between environments.

If this is not enough of a problem, this...