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

Interacting with Docker containers

Linux container technologies, especially Docker, have grown in popularity in recent years, and this has continued since the previous edition of this book was published. Containers provide a fast path to resource isolation while maintaining the consistency of the runtime environment. They can be launched quickly and are efficient to run, as there is very little overhead involved. Utilities such as Docker provide a lot of useful tooling for container management, such as a registry of images to use as the filesystem, tooling to build the images themselves, clustering orchestration, and so on. Through its ease of use, Docker has become one of the most popular ways to manage containers, though others, such as Podman and LXC, are becoming much more prevalent. For now, though, we will focus on Docker, given its broad appeal and wide install base.

Ansible can interact with Docker in numerous ways as well. Notably, Ansible can be used to build...