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

Summary

As more and more of our infrastructure gets defined and managed by code, it becomes ever more important that the network layer can be automated effectively by Ansible. A great deal of work has gone into Ansible since the previous release of this book in precisely this area, especially since the release of Ansible 2.5. With these advancements, it is now easy to build playbooks to automate network tasks, from simple device changes to rolling out entire network architectures through Ansible. All of the benefits of Ansible relating to code reuse, portability, and so on are available to those who manage network devices.

In this chapter, you learned about how Ansible enables network management. You learned about effective strategies for handling different device types within your infrastructure and how to write playbooks for them, and then you expanded on this with some specific examples on Arista EOS and Cumulus Linux. Finally, you learned about some of the best practices that...