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

Starting with Simple Automation

When you start your automation journey, start with simple use cases instead of automating complex workflows. Find three small use cases that you can use to learn automation faster and implement it in your environment. Ansible has a smooth learning curve but it is also important to choose the right use cases for your first automation project. Three great examples for initial use cases for automation are simple tasks such as application deployment, asset information collection, and simple file manipulation such as copy operations.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following topics:

  • Identifying manual tasks to be automated
  • Finding the Ansible modules to use
  • Configuring your text editor for Ansible
  • Connecting to remote nodes

You will start by creating basic automation tasks by finding suitable modules before learning how to use credentials and other parameters.