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

Handling sensitive data in Ansible

It is a known practice not to keep sensitive data in plain text format. The same rule applies to Ansible as well, as you will be dealing with different types of sensitive data in Ansible. The sensitive data could be anything, such as the following:

  • System passwords
  • API keys
  • Port details of applications
  • Database passwords
  • SSL certificates or keys
  • Cloud credentials

We have already learned that Ansible uses plain text format for playbooks, variables, and all other configurations. Hence, storing sensitive data in normal variable files is not desirable and we need to store such information using a more secure method.

Before we jump into the details of Ansible Vault, let us learn about some of the alternative secret management methods in the following sections.

Integrating with Vault services

One of the most common methods for storing sensitive information is using key vault software and services where we can...