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

Managing secrets using Ansible Vault

Ansible Vault is very flexible, as we can encrypt, view, decrypt, or change the Vault password (as in, rekey it) at any time as needed. The Vault password must be stored safely, as you will not be able to retrieve the encrypted Vault content without the Vault password.

Creating Vault files

In the following exercise, we will learn how to create an encrypted file using Ansible Vault:

  1. To create a Vault file from scratch, use the ansible-vault create command, as shown in Figure 13.6:

Figure 13.6 – Creating a Vault file

  1. After we enter the Vault password, a new file will open in the default text editor, such as vim or nano (we can change the default editor by updating the $EDITOR environment variable). Enter the variables and values as needed, just as with a normal variable file:
    cloud_username: myusername 
    cloud_password: mysecretpassword

Refer to Figure 13.7 for further details:

...