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

Since the last release of this book, there have been many changes to Ansible, but the most notable (which is expected to impact everyone reading this book) is the introduction of collections to manage modules, roles, plugins, and more, and decoupling them from the core release of Ansible. Probably the most noticeable change to Ansible code is in the introduction of FQCNs and the need to install collections if they are not part of the Ansible 4.3 package.

In this chapter, you learned about the reasons for the introduction of collections in Ansible, and how they impact everything from your playbook code to the way you install, maintain, and upgrade Ansible itself. You learned that collections are easy to build from scratch, and even how to build your own, before looking at ways to install and manage collections for your playbook. Finally, you learned the fundamentals of porting your Ansible code from earlier releases.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to secure secret...