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

Keeping Automation Simple and Efficient

Ansible is a simple and powerful automation tool. We can automate any kind of workflow using Ansible but if we increase complexity in automation, we decrease efficiency, which kills productivity. When you design an automated solution or use case, you must consider multiple factors, such as the capability of the tool and flexibility in adjusting the automation’s flow or scalability.

For example, it is possible to write simple playbooks to monitor the service status in a system or to check the health of an application. But this is not efficient as you need other arrangements such as job schedulers to execute the job at regular intervals and monitor the execution. Instead of using Ansible natively for complex automation tasks, we can utilize the integration capabilities of the Ansible automation controller and other systems. We can use the existing tools for monitoring, logging, and security control, and use Ansible for remediation actions...