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

In this chapter, we covered how Ansible can deal with sensitive data effectively and securely, harnessing the latest Ansible features, including securing differing data with different passwords and mixing encrypted data with plain YAML. We have also shown how this data is stored at rest and how this data is treated when utilized, and that with a little care and attention, Ansible can keep your secrets secret.

You learned how to use the ansible-vault tool to protect sensitive data by creating, editing, and modifying encrypted files, and the variety of methods available for providing the Vault password, including prompting the user, obtaining the password from a file, and running a script to retrieve it. You also learned how to mix encrypted strings with plain YAML files, and how this simplifies playbook layout. Finally, you learned the operational aspects of using Ansible Vault, thus preventing Ansible from leaking data to remote log files or onscreen displays.

In our...