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

Utilizing surveys and automated inputs

In Chapter 8, Helping the Database Team with Automation, you learned the advantages of integrating Jira service management with Ansible to automate database operations. Instead of copying the input details from the Jira ticket to the Ansible automation controller, you learned how to integrate with Jira and pass the variables automatically. This enables zero-touch integration without needing to input the details for the automation job, such as the database name, server name, database username, or database tables.

You learned about similar samples in Chapter 12, Integrating Jenkins with Ansible Automation Platform, where Jenkins calls the Ansible automation controller API to execute the job template. From the Ansible automation controller, you used survey fields and elegant forms to pass such information:

Figure 14.1 – Survey form for the PostgreSQL – Create Database and User Access job template

When we...