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

Expanding Your Automation Landscape

It is important to find and apply automation at the right place and at the right level. Usually, when searching for automation use cases, people make mistakes by automating the inappropriate tasks and end up wasting money, effort, and time. This is the reason why we need to analyze the environment and day-to-day tasks and find the best tasks as automation candidates. We can use your statistical data such as event tickets, customer change requests, and project tasks to find this information.

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

  • Finding your automation use cases in your day-to-day work
  • Automation feasibility and usability
  • Involving teams in the automation journey
  • The Ansible dynamic inventory

We will start with standard methods to analyze the tasks to find the highest number of tasks and check the feasibility of automation. We will explore the integration opportunities between IT service management...