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

Finding your automation use cases in your day-to-day work

We all know that every member of staff working in an IT environment is executing some tasks and most of the time, they repeat the same job every day. Looking around, we can see many examples, as follows:

  • A system engineer is building servers and virtual machines, installing packages, patching old systems, and more.
  • A network engineer is configuring the new network device and firewall devices, configuring ports and virtual local area networks (VLANs) based on requests, patching the device firmware, and many other things.
  • A developer is struggling to build his coding environment every time there is a new version of the programming language or software library. They are also spending a lot of time testing the code and waiting for test results.
  • A storage administrator is spending their valuable time provisioning the disk space and configuring the storage devices.
  • A database administrator is complaining about...