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

Managing cloud platforms using Ansible

As you learned in the previous chapters, Ansible can manage both Linux, Windows, and network devices. But virtualization platforms work differently and you cannot use SSH-based connections and operations to automate such platforms. Most of these platforms offer application programming interface (API) and software development kit (SDK)-based access to help us access and control such platforms over HTTP (or HTTPS). Since Ansible can use SDK (Python libraries) and communicate over HTTP/HTTPS, it is possible to automate any platforms that offer such access.

The following diagram shows the different connection methods used by Ansible to communicate with the managed devices and platforms:

Figure 7.2 – Ansible connection methods

Application Programming Interface

An API is a connection or protocol that allows one system to communicate with another using a dedicated set of instructions and results. Unlike command...