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

Protecting secrets while operating

In the previous section of this chapter, we covered how to protect your secrets at rest on the filesystem. However, that is not the only concern when operating Ansible with secrets. That secret data is going to be used in tasks as module arguments, loop inputs, or any number of other things. This may cause the data to be transmitted to remote hosts, logged to local or remote log files, or even displayed onscreen. This section of the chapter will discuss strategies for protecting your secrets during operation.

Secrets transmitted to remote hosts

As we learned in Chapter 1, The System Architecture and Design of Ansible, Ansible combines module code and arguments and writes this out to a temporary directory on the remote host. This means your secret data is transferred over the wire and written to the remote filesystem. Unless you are using a connection plugin other than Secure Shell (SSH) or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)-encrypted Windows Remote...