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

Serving applications using a load balancer

So far, you have learned how to deploy applications to multiple servers using Ansible with all the necessary prerequisites, dependencies, and basic health checks. But if the application or website is running on multiple servers, then you will need to tell the end user about multiple servers so that they can access the website. It is a best practice to serve the application from a single entity such as a load balancer, as shown in the following diagram, so that the end user doesn’t need to know the actual web or application server IP addresses. It will also help you implement high availability and rolling updates for the application:

Figure 9.15 – Website hosted on multiple servers with a load balancer

Since we are handling the application deployment using Ansible inside the CI/CD workflow, we can include the load balancer installation and configuration tasks inside the pipeline, as shown in the following...