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

Rolling updates using Ansible

Continuous deployment is a method meant for frequent application deployment (together with CI/CD) and frequent updates of your application or website rather than you having to wait for scheduled downtime and deployment cycles. But you also need to ensure the application will be available during the update process. So far, you have learned that application high availability can be achieved using a load balancer. In this section, you will learn how to update the application on web servers without downtime.

Steps involved in an application update

Depending on your application’s type and the components involved, the update process may contain different steps and procedures. The following diagram shows the generic steps involved in the application update process, which is running behind a load balancer:

Figure 9.23 – Steps involved in an application update

It is possible to automate all such tasks using Ansible,...