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

Getting familiar with the Ansible framework

In this section, you will understand how the Ansible framework fits into IT operations automation. We will explain how to start Ansible for the first time. Once you understand this framework, you will be ready to start learning more advanced concepts, such as creating and running playbooks with your own inventory.

In order to run Ansible's ad hoc commands via an SSH connection from your Ansible control machine to multiple remote hosts, you need to ensure you have the latest Ansible version installed on the control host. Use the following command to confirm the latest Ansible version:

$ ansible --version
ansible 2.9.6
config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
configured module search path = [u'/home/jamesf_local/.ansible/plugins/modules', u'/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
ansible python module location = /usr...