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

Exploring Collaboration in Automation Development

When you work as a team, collaboration is the key to your team’s harmony. Instead of keeping your automation content and knowledge to yourself, you can share it with your team, or even other departments. By doing that, the content will be useful to many others and also, they can contribute with their own ideas and tips. Compared to custom scripts, Ansible content is human-readable and easy for others to understand. Hence, they can modify it and later contribute to the content by fixing bugs or adding features. It is possible to use any standard methods to keep and distribute your Ansible automation content, such as a Git server, Subversion, or any other Version Control System (VCS).

In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics:

  • The importance of version control in IT automation
  • Where should I keep automation artifacts?
  • Managing automation content in a Git server
  • Collaboration is the key...