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 playbook best practices

It is important to develop your Ansible playbooks with reader-friendliness and reusability in mind. Since the YAML format is human readable, it is easy to develop and follow some style guides for your Ansible playbooks.

In Chapter 15, Using Raw Commands for Network Operations, you learned when to use the raw module and commands. Always check the documentation and see if there are modules available for your task. The command, shell, raw, and script modules can be used if no suitable modules are available for the task. But always keep in mind that the command, shell, raw, and script modules are not idempotent and will always report as changed when executed.

Always give your tasks names

Even though the name parameter is an optional component, it is a best practice to provide an appropriate and meaningful name for the plays, tasks, blocks, and other components in your Ansible playbooks. Refer to Figure 16.22, where you can see the sample names that...