Book Image

Ansible Playbook Essentials

By : Gourav Shah, GOURAV JAWAHAR SHAH
Book Image

Ansible Playbook Essentials

By: Gourav Shah, GOURAV JAWAHAR SHAH

Overview of this book

Ansible Playbook Essentials will show you how to write a blueprint of your infrastructure, encompassing multitier applications using Ansible's playbooks. Beginning with basic concepts such as plays, tasks, handlers, inventory, and YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML) syntax that Ansible uses, you'll understand how to organize your code into a modular structure. Building on this, you will study techniques to create data-driven playbooks with variables, templates, logical constructs, and encrypted data, which will further strengthen your application skills in Ansible. Adding to this, the book will also take you through advanced clustering concepts, such as discovering topology information about other nodes in the cluster and managing multiple environments with isolated configurations. As you approach the concluding chapters, you can expect to learn about orchestrating infrastructure and deploying applications in a coordinated manner. By the end of this book, you will be able to design solutions to your automation and orchestration problems using playbooks quickly and efficiently.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Ansible Playbook Essentials
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Setting Up the Learning Environment
References
Index

Chapter 8. Encrypting Data with Vault

Using variables, we saw how to separate data and code. Often, the data provided is sensitive, for example, user passwords, data base credentials, API keys, and other organization-specific information. Ansible-playbooks, being a source code, are most commonly stored in version control repositories such as a git, which makes it even more difficult to protect this sensitive information in a collaborative environment. Starting with version 1.5, Ansible provides a solution called vault to store and retrieve such sensitive information securely, using proven encryption technologies. The objective of using vault is to encrypt data that can then be stored and shared freely with a version control system, such as git, without the values being compromised.

In this chapter, we will learn about the following topics:

  • Understanding the Ansible-vault

  • Securing data using the Ansible-vault

  • Encryption, decryption, and rekeying operations