Book Image

Mastering Ansible. - Third Edition

By : James Freeman, Jesse Keating
Book Image

Mastering Ansible. - Third Edition

By: James Freeman, Jesse Keating

Overview of this book

Automation is essential for success in the modern world of DevOps. Ansible provides a simple, yet powerful, automation engine for tackling complex automation challenges. This book will take you on a journey that will help you exploit the latest version's advanced features to help you increase efficiency and accomplish complex orchestrations. This book will help you understand how Ansible 2.7 works at a fundamental level and will also teach you to leverage its advanced capabilities. Throughout this book, you will learn how to encrypt Ansible content at rest and decrypt data at runtime. Next, this book will act as an ideal resource to help you master the advanced features and capabilities required to tackle complex automation challenges. Later, it will walk you through workflows, use cases, orchestrations, troubleshooting, and Ansible extensions. Lastly, you will examine and debug Ansible operations, helping you to understand and resolve issues. By the end of the book, you will be able to unlock the true power of the Ansible automation engine and tackle complex, real- world actions with ease.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Ansible Overview and Fundamentals
6
Section 2: Writing and Troubleshooting Ansible Playbooks
12
Section 3: Orchestration with Ansible

Developing modules

Modules are the workhorse of Ansible. They provide just enough abstraction so that playbooks can be stated simply and clearly. There are over 100 modules maintained by the core Ansible development team, covering clouds, commands, databases, files, networks, packaging, source control, system, utilities, web infrastructure, and so on. In addition, there are nearly 2,000 other modules maintained by community contributors that expand functionality in many of these categories. The real magic happens inside the module code, which takes in the arguments passed to it and works to establish the desired outcome.

Modules in Ansible are the pieces of code that get transported to the remote host to be executed. They can be written in any language that the remote host can execute; however, Ansible provides some very useful shortcuts for writing modules in Python.

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