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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned that it is possible to define specifically how Ansible perceives a failure or a change when a specific task is run, how to use blocks to gracefully handle errors and perform cleanup, and how to write tight efficient code using loops.

As a result, you should now be able to alter any given task to provide specific conditions under which Ansible will fail it or consider a change successful. This is incredibly valuable when running shell commands, as we have demonstrated in this chapter, and also serves when defining specialized use cases for existing modules. You should also now be able to organize your Ansible tasks into blocks, ensuring that if failures do occur, recovery actions can be taken that would otherwise not need to be run. Finally, you should now be able to write tight, efficient Ansible playbooks using loops, removing the need for...