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

What are Ansible Collections?

Ansible Collections represent a major departure from the traditional monolithic approach to Ansible releases, where over 3,600 modules were being released along with the Ansible executables at one point. This, as you can imagine, was making Ansible releases unmanageable, and also meant that end users had to wait for an entirely new release of Ansible to receive a feature update or bug fix to a single module—obviously a very inefficient approach.

Thus, Ansible Collections were born, and their premise is quite simple: they are a mechanism for building, distributing, and consuming multiple different types of Ansible content. When you first migrate from Ansible 2.9 or earlier, your experience with Ansible Collections will come in the form of modules. As we discussed earlier in this chapter, what we call Ansible 4.3 is actually a package comprising around 85 collections…it does not contain the Ansible executables at all! Each of these collections...