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

Red Hat AAP components

Red Hat AAP is an automation suite that contains multiple components, as shown in the following diagram:

Figure 12.4 – High-level diagram of Red Hat AAP 2.1 components (source: https://www.ansible.com/blog/introducing-red-hat-ansible-automation-platform-2.1)

In the following sections, you will learn about the different components of AAP, such as the automation controller, execution environments, and automation mesh.

Ansible automation controller

The automation controller was referred to as Ansible Tower previously. It is the control plane and the core component of AAP. With the introduction of the Ansible automation controller, the control plane components (WebUI and API) become decoupled from the execution environment (EE), which also helps the solution with additional execution nodes.

With the automation controller, we can manage the AAP operations from the WebUI, such as managing remote nodes (inventory), credentials...