Book Image

Mastering Ansible, 4th Edition - Fourth Edition

By : James Freeman, Jesse Keating
Book Image

Mastering Ansible, 4th Edition - Fourth Edition

By: James Freeman, Jesse Keating

Overview of this book

Ansible is a modern, YAML-based automation tool (built on top of Python, one of the world’s most popular programming languages) with a massive and ever-growing user base. Its popularity and Python underpinnings make it essential learning for all in the DevOps space. This fourth edition of Mastering Ansible provides complete coverage of Ansible automation, from the design and architecture of the tool and basic automation with playbooks to writing and debugging your own Python-based extensions. You'll learn how to build automation workflows with Ansible’s extensive built-in library of collections, modules, and plugins. You'll then look at extending the modules and plugins with Python-based code and even build your own collections — ultimately learning how to give back to the Ansible community. By the end of this Ansible book, you'll be confident in all aspects of Ansible automation, from the fundamentals of playbook design to getting under the hood and extending and adapting Ansible to solve new automation challenges.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Ansible Overview and Fundamentals
7
Section 2: Writing and Troubleshooting Ansible Playbooks
13
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 and plugins maintained by the core Ansible development team and they are distributed as part of the ansible-core package, covering commands, files, package management, source control, system, utilities, and so on. In addition, there are nearly 6,000 other modules maintained by community contributors that expand functionality in many of these categories and many others, such as public cloud providers, databases, networking, and so on, through collections. The real magic happens inside the module's code, which takes in the arguments that are 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...