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 Automation – Introduction

Ansible is open source automation and orchestration software that can be used for automating most of your operations with IT infrastructure components including servers, storage, networks, and application platforms. Ansible is one of the most popular automation tools in the IT world now and has strong community support with more than 5,000 contributors around the world.

In this chapter we are going to cover the following topics:

  • What is Ansible? Where should I use this automation tool?
  • Deploying Ansible
  • Configuring your managed nodes

As of today, Ansible is only available on Linux/Unix platforms, but that doesn't mean you cannot use Ansible to automate other operating systems (OSs) or devices. It is possible to use Ansible to automate almost all components involved in the IT infrastructure, as there are thousands of supported modules available to support Ansible automation.