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

Handling multiple device types

In a world where we are not locked into a single vendor, it is important to know how we might handle the different network devices in an infrastructure. We established in the last chapter that for different infrastructure providers, a similar process was established for each one in terms of getting Ansible to interact with it. This can be a little different with switches, as not all command-line switch interfaces are created the same. Some, such as on a Cumulus Networks switch, use straightforward SSH connectivity, meaning that everything we have learned about in this book so far on connecting to an SSH capable device still applies. However, other devices, such as F5 BIG-IP, do not use such an interface and therefore require the module to be run from the Ansible host, and the configuration parameters to be passed to the module directly as opposed...