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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about IaC concepts and how to use Ansible as an IaC tool. You also learned about how Ansible can manage virtualization and cloud platforms such as VMware, AWS, and GCP. Then, you learned about the different methods and credential configurations for these platforms so that Ansible can access and execute automated operations.

Next, you explored the Ansible modules and collections that are available for VMware, AWS, and GCP. By developing the basic playbooks for creating new virtual machines (EC2 instances or GCP instances), you have started your journey in infrastructure automation and management. Expand the playbook’s content to build use cases suitable for your cloud and virtualization environment.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to help non-platform teams use Ansible for their automation use cases, such as building and managing databases using Ansible.