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

Automating Non-Standard Platforms and Operations

So far, you have learned about the different systems and platforms (managed nodes) such as Linux systems, Microsoft Windows systems, network devices, and cloud platforms, all of which can be automated using Ansible. You have used different methods and protocols to connect to the target system or platform to execute the automated operations. You do not need to understand how complex operations are running inside these systems because Ansible will understand and take appropriate actions on the target systems to reach the desired state.

What if there are no standard Ansible modules or connection methods available for a specific operation on the managed node? Or what if the module is missing some feature you are looking for? For example, let’s say you want to automate a machine that doesn’t have the supported Python version installed, and you want to use Ansible to automate this Python installation or run raw commands on...