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

Identifying manual tasks to be automated

In the previous chapter, you learned how to use Ansible ad hoc commands to manually execute tasks on remotely managed nodes using Ansible modules. Now, you will learn how to start with simple Ansible playbooks and tasks. Remember, you need to add your managed node details to your inventory file before you can execute any Ansible tasks.

We will start with a simple automation job to understand the basics of the Ansible playbook. For this example, we are assuming you have installed and configured the chronyd application. The chrony application is an implementation of the Network Time Protocol (NTP). chronyd is the default NTP client and server in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 and is available in many Linux distributions.

For our example Ansible playbook, we will do the following:

  1. Install the chrony package on all nodes.
  2. Adjust the chrony configurations.
  3. Start the chronyd service and enable...