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

Troubleshooting and Testing Strategies

In a similar way to any other kind of code, Ansible code can contain issues and bugs. Ansible tries to make it as safe as possible by checking the task syntax before the task is executed. This check, however, only saves you from a small number of possible types of errors, such as incorrect task parameters, but it will not protect you from others.

It's also important to remember that, due to its nature, in Ansible code, we describe the desired state rather than stating a sequence of steps to obtain the desired state. This difference means that the system is less prone to logical errors.
Nevertheless, a bug in a Playbook could mean a potential misconfiguration on all of your machines. This should be taken very seriously. It is even more critical when critical parts of the system are changed, such as SSH daemon or sudo configuration, since...