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

Ansible workflow templates

It is possible to create any number of tasks in a single playbook and make it a long workflow. For example, a Linux operating system job template can include the following tasks:

  1. Create a VM snapshot before you start patching.
  2. Save the configuration file backups.
  3. Stop the services inside the system.
  4. Perform various Linux operating system patching tasks.
  5. Reboot the system.
  6. Wait for the system to boot up and start the necessary services.
  7. Handle the VM snapshot restore operation in the same job if the VM reboot is not successful.

Note that most of the tasks can be reused as individual jobs for creating snapshots, stopping services, or configuration backup.

Instead of developing long, complex job templates, utilize the workflow templates in the automation controller to create modular job workflows and handle tasks based on success/failure status. Workflow templates are created by stitching multiple job templates together...