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

The importance of version control in IT automation

Like any other software, configurations, or scripts, it is not a best practice to keep your Ansible playbooks and configurations on the local machine, which is the Ansible control node. There are many reasons for not keeping the automation content on the local Ansible control node. A few of them are listed here:

  • If something happens to the Ansible control node, you will lose all your automation content, which is not desirable.
  • If someone accidentally deletes any files or changes any configurations, you will not have the opportunity to restore the original content.
  • If you want to make any changes to configurations or playbooks, then you need to make a backup of files and configurations. This is general practice in case something goes wrong and you want to restore an old version of your files.

You need to consider the Ansible automation content as software code, which should keep track of every change and have...