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

Automating Windows tasks with Ansible

A full list of the Windows modules for Ansible is available at the following link, and it must be noted that, although you can use all the familiar Ansible constructs with Windows hosts such as vars, handlers, and blocks, you must use Windows-specific modules when defining tasks:

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/list_of_windows_modules.html

In this part of the chapter, we will run through a few simple examples of Windows playbooks to highlight a few of the things you need to know when writing playbooks for Windows.

Picking the right module

If you were running Ansible against a Linux server, and wanted to create a directory and then copy a file into it, you would use the...