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

Finding the Ansible modules to use

In this section, you will learn how to find suitable modules and documentation to use inside the Ansible playbook.

Find the available modules and details using the ansible-doc command:

Figure 2.12 – Ansible module list

It will be a long or short list, depending on your type of Ansible installation. (Recall the difference between ansible, ansible-base, and ansible-core, which was explained in the previous chapter.) You can check the total module count that’s available as follows:

[ansible@ansible Chapter-02]$ ansible-doc -l |wc -l
6108

Check the module details by calling the module name with the -s (--snippet) argument, as follows:

Figure 2.13 – Ansible module snippet for the dnf module

Alternatively, Check the full details of the module as follows:

Figure 2.14 – Ansible module details for the dnf module

The preceding output shows the example...