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

Porting between Ansible versions

Ansible is a fast-moving project, and with releases and new features added, new modules (and module enhancements) are released and the inevitable bugs that come with the software are fixed. There is no doubt that you will end up writing your code against one version of Ansible only to need to run it on a newer version again at some point. By way of example, when we started writing this book, the current release of Ansible was 2.7. As we are editing this book ready for publication, version 2.9.6 is the current stable version.

Often, you will find that your code from an earlier version "just about works" when you upgrade it, but this isn't always a given. Modules are sometimes deprecated (although usually not without warning) and features do change. Several major changes are expected when Ansible 2.10 is released. So, the question...