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

Ansible, containers, and CI/CD

Containerizing applications will give you more options for integrating, delivering, and deploying them since most of the tools support automated builds, tests, and executions. A typical containerized application workflow can be seen in the following diagram:

Figure 10.6 – Typical CI/CD tasks in a Docker-based deployment

Most of the tasks in the preceding diagram can be automated using Ansible as the Ansible collection for Docker and Podman contains several modules to support building, running, and managing containers on your container host. Either implement the entire workflow using Ansible or use Ansible with our favourite CI/CD tools and execute the tasks more flexibly. You will learn how to integrate Ansible with Jenkins in Chapter 12, Integrating Ansible with Your Tools.

In this next section, you will learn how to manage containers using Ansible and manage the container life cycle.