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

Using Ansible as a provisioning tool in Terraform

Ansible can be used as an IaC tool, as you learned in Chapter 7, Managing Your Virtualization and Cloud Platforms. At the same time, it is a common practice in the industry to use the right tool for the right task – for example, Terraform for IaC, Ansible for IT automation, Jenkins for CI/CD pipelines, and so on. Instead of comparing similar tools, integrate them in the right place and achieve better results.

Terraform is an open source tool by HashiCorp for implementing IaC practices. Terraform can be used to deploy and manage the cloud-based infrastructure and applications using infrastructure code written in a declarative configuration language called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). Depending on the cloud platform and components, use the provider modules and resources available. Refer to https://registry.terraform.io/browse/providers to explore the available and supported providers.

For example, the following...