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

Technical requirements

Ansible has a fairly minimal set of system requirementsas such, you should find that if you have a machine (either a laptop, a server, or a virtual machine) that is capable of running Python, then you will be able to run Ansible on it. Later in this chapter, we will demonstrate the installation methods for Ansible on a variety of operating systems—it is hence left to you to decide which operating systems are right for you.

The one exception to the preceding statement is Microsoft Windowsalthough there are Python environments available for Windows, there is as yet no native build of Ansible for Windows. Readers running more recent versions of Windows will be able to install Ansible using Windows Subsystem for Linux (henceforth, WSL) and by following the procedures outlined later for their chosen WSL environment (for example, if you install Ubuntu on WSL, you should simply follow the instructions given in this chapter for installing Ansible on Ubuntu).