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.

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Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Preface
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Get in touch
1
Section 1: Learning the Fundamentals of Ansible
Section 1: Learning the Fundamentals of Ansible
Free Chapter
2
Getting Started with Ansible
Getting Started with Ansible
Technical requirements
Installing and configuring Ansible
Understanding your Ansible installation
Running from source versus pre-built RPMs
Summary
Questions
Further reading
3
Understanding the Fundamentals of Ansible
Understanding the Fundamentals of Ansible
Technical requirements
Getting familiar with the Ansible framework
Exploring the configuration file
Command-line arguments
Defining variables
Understanding Jinja2 filters
Summary
Questions
Further reading
4
Defining Your Inventory
Defining Your Inventory
Technical requirements
Creating an inventory file and adding hosts
Generating a dynamic inventory file
Special host management using patterns
Summary
Questions
Further reading
5
Playbooks and Roles
Playbooks and Roles
Technical requirements
Understanding the playbook framework
Understanding roles – the playbook organizer
Using conditions in your code
Repeating tasks with loops
Grouping tasks using blocks
Configuring play execution via strategies
Using ansible-pull
Summary
Questions
Further reading
6
Section 2: Expanding the Capabilities of Ansible
Section 2: Expanding the Capabilities of Ansible
7
Consuming and Creating Modules
Consuming and Creating Modules
Technical requirements
Executing multiple modules using the command line
Reviewing the module index
Accessing module documentation from the command line
Module return values
Developing custom modules
Summary
Questions
Further reading
8
Consuming and Creating Plugins
Consuming and Creating Plugins
Technical requirements
Discovering the plugin types
Finding included plugins
Creating custom plugins
Summary
Questions
Further reading
9
Coding Best Practices
Coding Best Practices
Technical requirements
The preferred directory layout
The best approach to cloud inventories
Differentiating between different environment types
The proper approach to defining group and host variables
Using top-level playbooks
Leveraging version control tools
Setting OS and distribution variances
Porting between Ansible versions
Summary
Questions
Further reading
10
Advanced Ansible Topics
Advanced Ansible Topics
Technical requirements
Asynchronous versus synchronous actions
Control play execution for rolling updates
Configuring the maximum failure percentage
Setting task execution delegation
Using the run_once option
Running playbooks locally
Working with proxies and jump hosts
Configuring playbook prompts
Placing tags in the plays and tasks
Securing data with Ansible Vault
Summary
Questions
Further reading
11
Section 3: Using Ansible in an Enterprise
Section 3: Using Ansible in an Enterprise
12
Network Automation with Ansible
Network Automation with Ansible
Technical requirements
Why automate network management?
Learning how Ansible manages networking devices
Connecting to network devices
Conditional statements for networking devices
Summary
Questions
Further reading
13
Container and Cloud Management
Container and Cloud Management
Technical requirements
Designing and building containers with playbooks
Managing multiple container platforms
Automating Docker with Ansible
Exploring container-focused modules
Automating against Amazon Web Services
Complementing Google Cloud Platform with automation
Seamless automation integration to Azure
Expanding your environment with Rackspace Cloud
Using Ansible to orchestrate OpenStack
Summary
Questions
Further reading
14
Troubleshooting and Testing Strategies
Troubleshooting and Testing Strategies
Technical requirements
Digging into playbook execution problems
Using host facts to diagnose failures
Testing with a playbook
Solving host connection issues
Passing working variables via the CLI
Flushing the code cache
Checking for bad syntax
Summary
Questions
Further reading
15
Getting Started with Ansible Tower
Getting Started with Ansible Tower
Technical requirements
Installing AWX
Running your first playbook from AWX
Controlling access to AWX
Summary
Questions
16
Assessments
Assessments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
17
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Getting Started with Ansible Tower

Ansible is very powerful, but it does require the user to use the CLI. In some situations, this is not the best option, such as in cases where you need to trigger an Ansible job from another job (where APIs would be better) or in cases where the person that should trigger a job should only be able to trigger that specific job. For these cases, AWX or Ansible Tower are better options to use.

The only differences between AWX and Ansible Tower are that AWX is the upstream and open source version, while Ansible Tower is the Red Hat and downstream product that is officially supported but for a price, and also the delivery method. AWX is available as a Docker container that can run everywhere, while Ansible Tower is installed on the system and requires specific versions of Linux—more specifically, RHEL 7.4+, RHEL 8.0+, and CentOS 7.4+, at the...

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