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

Creating custom modules for Ansible

In the previous sections, you learned how to automate operations if the standard modules are not available for specific tasks. But modules are the standard way of implementing automation and help you develop Ansible playbooks without worrying about the complex operations in the backend. If you know the backend operations and how to execute the tasks in the backend, then create a module for Ansible to execute a specific operation. Finally, contribute it back to the community via Ansible collections. That is the way the open source community grows.

Facts to check before creating a custom Ansible module

You can use any programming language (which can be called by the Ansible API, the ansible command, or the ansible-playbook command), libraries, and methods for your new Ansible module. Most of the Ansible modules that you are using now are written in the Python programming language. Before developing a new module, check yourself on the following...