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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to use Ansible to automate non-supported and non-standard operations using the Ansible raw module. You explored the raw command’s execution on servers, network devices, firewall devices, and more.

Then, you learned how to interact with the devices that provide API-based operations. The Ansible uri module was used to interact with a ToDo application; you explored the options for fetching and adding items to the application via APIs. You also learned about the API-based operations for devices and explored some sample usage using the Akamai DNS API.

In addition to the raw command and API-based operations, you learned about Ansible custom modules and how to create custom modules using bash and Python. In the end, you distributed the custom modules to Ansible Galaxy as an Ansible content collection.

With that, you have explored a common production use case where you can use Ansible as a perfect automation tool and Red Hat Ansible...