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 notifications

It is very important to notify the administrators and end users about the changes you are making in the environment. Whether it’s a simple package installation or a system reboot, the end user should be aware of the downtime and changes that are occurring. Instead of sending emails manually, the Ansible mail module can be used to automate email notifications. The Ansible mail module is powerful and can support most email features, including custom headers, attachments, and security.

Encrypting sensitive data using Ansible Vault

If the email server (SMTP) is not open (configured to send email without authentication), then you need to authenticate the SMTP server with a username and password (app password or secret key). Keeping such sensitive information in plain text is not a best practice, so you need to store it in a safe method. To store such sensitive information, use key vault tools, in which the information will be saved in an encrypted format...