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 plugins are a core part of Ansible's functionality and we discovered, in this chapter, that we have been working with them throughout this book without even realizing it! Ansible's modular design makes it easy to extend and add functionality to, regardless of whether you are working with modules or the various types of plugins that are currently supported. Whether it's to add a new filter for string processing or a new way of looking up data (or perhaps even a new connection mechanism to new technology), Ansible plugins provide a complete framework that can extend Ansible far beyond its already extensive capabilities.

In this chapter, we learned about the various types of plugins that are supported by Ansible, before exploring them in greater detail and looking at how you can obtain documentation and information on the existing ones. We then completed...