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

Using API calls for automation

In Chapter 6, Automating Microsoft Windows and Network Devices, you learned about the different ways Ansible can talk to managed nodes, platforms, or applications. So as long as there is a supported method to access the target system, it is possible use Ansible to automate these tasks. In the previous chapters, you learned about the integration between Ansible and other tools such as Jira, ServiceNow, Kubernetes, public or private cloud platforms, and so on. For such platforms, most of those modules use HTTP/HTTPS API calls to execute operations. This means that if there are no modules available to automate your operations but there is an API method, you can use the same raw API calls from your Ansible playbook.

Python SDK and API Calls

Please remember that not all modules use direct or native API calls to execute the operations; some modules use Python libraries and software development kits (SDKs) to implement these tasks. For example, the FortiOS...