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

Changes in Ansible 4.3

While we touched on this topic in Chapter 1, The System Architecture and Design of Ansible, it is important that we look in greater depth at these changes to help you fully understand how Ansible 4.3 differs from prior releases. This will help you greatly in writing good playbooks and maintaining and upgrading your Ansible infrastructure – it is an essential step to mastery of Ansible 4.3!

First off, a little history. As we discussed in the preceding chapter, Ansible possesses a number of strengths in its design that have led to its rapid growth and uptake. Many of these strengths, such as its agentless design and easy-to-read YAML code, remain the same. Indeed, if you read the change logs for Ansible releases since 2.9, you will observe that there have been few changes of note to the core Ansible functionality since that release—rather, all the development effort has gone into another area.

Ansible's modules were undoubtedly one of its...