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

Involving teams in the automation journey

It is a common misunderstanding that the responsibility for finding use cases and implementing automation only falls to the systems team, platforms team, or infrastructure team. When we explore our work environment and day-to-day tasks, we will find thousands of tasks that we can automate using Ansible. It could be the database team managing database servers and instances, the network team handling network operations, or the application team who wants to deploy their application updates more effectively. Implementing automation in the environment is a collaborative journey, and we need support and guidance from different teams.

For example, typical database provisioning steps can be seen in Figure 5.5:

Figure 5.5 – Typical database provisioning tasks

Many of the tasks listed in Figure 5.5 can be automated using Ansible, and the workflow can be completed in minutes instead of days and weeks. The database team...