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

VyOS information gathering using Ansible

This is an optional exercise for you to become familiar with network automation using Ansible. We assume that you have the basic knowledge to install and configure the VyOS appliance inside a virtual machine with your choice of virtualization platform.

Download the VyOS image from https://support.vyos.io/en/downloads and install it as a virtual appliance (refer to the VyOS documentation at https://support.vyos.io/en/kb more for details).

VyOS Network Operating System

VyOs is an open source network operating system based on Debian Linux. VyOS provides most networking functionalities, such as routing, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), firewalls, Network Address Translation (NAT), and so on. Refer to https://vyos.io for more details.

In the following exercise, you will create a simple Ansible playbook to collect the operating system information from a VyOS device (or virtual appliance):

  1. Add the VyOS virtual machine details to...