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 Automation Best Practices for Production

Ansible can be used to automate IT infrastructure and DevOps tasks. Because of its flexible and modular architecture, we can implement large, complex automation use cases using Ansible. But at the same time, we need to keep the simplicity and reusability of the automation artifacts and methods.

In this chapter, you will learn about the important and well-known best practices for implementing efficient automation solutions.

First, you will learn how to organize the playbooks, roles, collections, and inventories in an Ansible project. After that, we will discuss the best practices for storing managed node information in the inventory and different methods for storing and maintaining multiple inventories. You can store the remote nodes separately based on their function, criticality, or location; these details will be explained in the upcoming sections.

You will also learn about the most efficient ways to store the variables...