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

Where should I keep automation artifacts?

Keep your playbooks and configurations in multiple Git repositories based on the automation and content type.

Ansible and Git repositories – best practices

There are many best practices for keeping your Ansible automation content in a VCS.

Repository for Ansible roles

If you are creating Ansible roles alone (it is no longer common to create individual roles for distribution without a collection), then create one Git repository per role so that the development and collaboration will be easy without depending on other tasks and configurations. See the sample ansible-role repositories in Figure 4.1.

Figure 4.1 – Separate repositories for Ansible roles

Repositories for Ansible collections

If you are creating Ansible collections, then create one Git repository per collection to make the development and management easy. Move your existing Ansible roles, libraries, modules, and other plugins...