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

Introduction to Red Hat AAP

So far, you have learned how to use Ansible, develop playbooks, create roles, use content collections, and more for your use cases. Anyone can install and use Ansible in their workstation or some random servers in an environment and use them for their automation use cases. However, there won’t be any standardization, traces, or accountability as each person works on their methods and practices. This will result in the following challenges in the organization:

  • Individuals work in silos, which will result in no collaboration in the workplace.
  • Automation artifacts (playbooks, roles, and collections) are not shared between individuals or teams.
  • No logging or auditing options will be available since the automation is running on an individual’s workstation or some random servers.
  • Less control over who can execute the playbooks or automated jobs.
  • Difficulty keeping secrets and credentials.
  • Lack of job scheduling and monitoring...