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 host variables and group variables

As you learned previously, like many other automation tools, Ansible allows you to use variables for dynamically executing playbooks. It is possible to configure the same playbook so that it can be executed for different desired states using variables and values. We can keep the variables inside the playbooks, external variable files, inventory files, and many other places. You learned more about variables in Chapter 6, Automating Microsoft Windows and Network Devices.

The same variable can be specified in multiple places but depending on the location of your variable and variable precedence, Ansible will apply the appropriate value for the variable.

Ansible uses the appropriate variable values and executes the playbooks based on them; the following diagram shows the typical flow where Ansible combines the variable values with the playbook:

Figure 16.9 – Ansible combines playbooks and variables for the final...