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

Collecting system information

In this section, you will extract the required information from ansible_facts and generate HTML reports inside the web server that you created in the previous section.

ansible_facts contains a lot of information about nested dictionaries and lists. Search and go through the content and find the important information you need for your report.

To see the content of ansible_facts, execute the following ad hoc command:

Figure 3.20 – Ansible facts output after using an ad hoc command

Using the less or more commands after the pipe (|) symbol will keep the output on top without you having to scroll to the bottom. It is possible to scroll down or up using the arrow keys or find the text by searching for it (/ + <text>).

Find sample ansible_facts details for a Linux machine at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Ansible-for-Real-life-Automation/tree/main/Chapter-03/node1-ansible-facts.

Follow these steps to use some...