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

Integrating AWX with your first playbook

There is a basic four-stage process involved in getting a playbook to run from AWX, and once this is understood, it paves the way for more advanced usage and fuller integration in an enterprise environment. In this part of the chapter, we will master these four stages in order to get to the stage where we can run our first simple playbook, and this will give us the building blocks to move forwards with AWX in confidence. The four stages are as follows:

  1. Define a project.
  2. Define an inventory.
  3. Define credentials.
  4. Define a template.

The first three stages can be performed in any order, but the template mentioned in the final stage pulls together the three previously-created facets, and so, it must be defined last. Also, note that there does not need to be a one-to-one relationship between these items—several templates can be created...