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

Automating Your Daily Jobs

Are you struggling to find automation use cases to start with Ansible automation? Your workplace is a great place to start your search for automation use cases. Track the most repeated jobs that you or your team are doing every day and you will see the opportunity to automate these tasks. This can be simple server information gathering, collecting operating system versions, or a simple weekly reboot job.

In this chapter, you will learn how to use the Jinja2 template to create reports and emails with the help of Ansible. You will also learn how to develop Ansible artifacts in a modular way and include tasks and variables dynamically.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Using Ansible to collect server details
  • Collecting system information
  • System scanning and remediation using Ansible
  • Automated weekly system reboot using Ansible
  • Automating notifications

We will start with ansible_facts and learn how to...