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

Ansible dynamic inventory

It is easy to manage your managed node information inside static inventory files when you have a smaller number of nodes or an almost fixed set of assets, such as bare-metal servers or virtual machines that are not frequently recreated. But, if your environment contains many dynamic nodes, such as virtual machines on multiple public or private cloud platforms, Kubernetes, or OpenShift platforms, then keeping your managed node information inside static files will be difficult, as you need to keep track of the changes and update your inventory files with them, including IP addresses, login credentials, and more. In such cases, you can use the dynamic inventory features in Ansible, which are basically some custom scripts and inventory plugins that collect inventory information from these virtualization or container platforms.

When you pass the dynamic inventories to Ansible, the inventory plugins will be executed and will collect the details of managed nodes...