Book Image

Ansible for Real-Life Automation

By : Gineesh Madapparambath
Book Image

Ansible for Real-Life Automation

By: Gineesh Madapparambath

Overview of this book

Get ready to leverage the power of Ansible’s wide applicability to automate and manage IT infrastructure with Ansible for Real-Life Automation. This book will guide you in setting up and managing the free and open source automation tool and remote-managed nodes in the production and dev/staging environments. Starting with its installation and deployment, you’ll learn automation using simple use cases in your workplace. You’ll go beyond just Linux machines to use Ansible to automate Microsoft Windows machines, network devices, and private and public cloud platforms such as VMWare, AWS, and GCP. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll integrate Ansible into your DevOps workflow and deal with application container management and container platforms such as Kubernetes. This Ansible book also contains a detailed introduction to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to help you get up to speed with Red Hat AAP and integration with CI/CD and ITSM. What’s more, you’ll implement efficient automation solutions while learning best practices and methods to secure sensitive data using Ansible Vault and alternatives to automate non-supported platforms and operations using raw commands, command modules, and REST API calls. By the end of this book, you’ll be proficient in identifying and developing real-life automation use cases using Ansible.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: Using Ansible as Your Automation Tool
6
Part 2: Finding Use Cases and Integrations
16
Part 3: Managing Your Automation Development Flow with Best Practices

A quick introduction to DevOps

In simple words, DevOps is the combination of development (Dev) and operations (Ops), but in reality, DevOps is a combination of ideas, tools, and practices that help increase the speed and efficiency of software development, delivery, and infrastructure management processes. There are several known best practices we can follow and include in the DevOps workflow, as follows:

  • Team collaboration and transparent communication
  • CI/CD
  • Infrastructure as code (IaC) and automated infrastructure management
  • Containerization and microservices
  • Logging, monitoring, and feedback loops

One of the key concepts in DevOps practices is to reduce the time and effort required for application life cycle management, such as integration, build, test, release, and deployment. Using DevOps methodologies and tools, it is possible to automate this process. This is known as CI/CD.

Learning about DevOps

Refer to the following guides to understand...