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

Using ansible-pull

The ansible-pull command is a special feature of Ansible that allows you to, all in one go, pull a playbook from a Git repository (for example, GitHub) and then execute it, hence saving the usual steps such as cloning (or updating the working copy of) the repository, then executing the playbook. The great thing about ansible-pull is that it allows you to centrally store and version control your playbooks and then execute them with a single command, hence enabling them to be executed using the cron scheduler without the need to even install the Ansible playbooks on a given box.

An important thing to note, however, is that, while the ansible and ansible-playbook commands can both operate over an entire inventory and run the playbooks against one or more remote hosts, the ansible-pull command is only intended to run the playbooks it obtains from your source control...