Book Image

Ansible Configuration Management - Second Edition

By : Daniel Hall
Book Image

Ansible Configuration Management - Second Edition

By: Daniel Hall

Overview of this book

<p>Ansible is an open source software platform for configuring and managing computers. It provides a clear and concise way to manage the configuration of your Linux infrastructure. This book is a step-by-step guide that provides you with the knowledge you require to effectively manage your systems in a simple, quick, and maintainable way, with real-world examples.</p> <p>You will begin by learning the basics of Ansible and then move on to exploring more advanced topics. You will then learn the basic and complex operations of playbooks and interact with modules to manage Windows machines and deploy them. You will also get acquainted with Ansible's more advanced features such as serially updating machines, delegating tasks to other machines, advanced uses of variables, looping and conditions, copying whole directories, and using filters to process variables. Towards the end of the book, you will learn how to increase the functionality of Ansible itself by writing your own modules and plugins.</p>
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

About the Reviewers

Maykel Moya has been working in Systems and Network Administration since 1999. Previously, he was at two of the largest ISPs in his hometown of Cuba, where he managed HA clusters, SAN, AAA systems, WAN, and Cisco routers. He entered the GNU/Linux landscape through RedHat, but today his main experience lies in Debian/Ubuntu systems. He identifies with the Free Software philosophy.

Convinced through personal experience that human intervention in computer operations doesn't scale and is error-prone, he is constantly seeking ways to let software offload the tedious and repetitive tasks from people. With a background in Puppet, he looked for alternatives and discovered Ansible in its early days. Since then he has been contributing to it.

He is currently employed by ShuttleCloud Corp., a company specialized in cloud data migration at scale. Here, he works as a Site Reliability Engineer, ensuring that the machine fleet is always available, runs reliably, and manages resources in an optimal manner. Ansible is one of the many technologies he uses to accomplish this on a daily basis.

Fernando F. Rodrigues is an IT professional with more than 10 years of experience in systems administration, especially with Linux and VMware. As a system administrator, he has always focused on programming and has experience in working on projects from the government sector to financial institutions. He is a technology enthusiast, and his areas of interest include cloud computing, virtualization, infrastructure automation, and Linux administration.

He is also the technical reviewer of the books VMware ESXi Cookbook and Learning Ansible, both by Packt Publishing.

Patrik Uytterhoeven has over 16 years of experience in IT. Most of this time was spent on HP Unix and Red Hat Linux. In late 2012, he joined Open-Future, a leading open source integrator and the first Zabbix reseller and training partner in Belgium.

When Patrik joined Open-Future, he gained the opportunity to certify himself as a Zabbix-certified trainer. Since then, he has provided training and public demonstrations not only in Belgium but also around the world, in countries such as the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, and Ireland.

Because Patrik also has a deep interest in configuration management, he wrote some Ansible roles for Red Hat 6.x and 7.x to deploy and update Zabbix. These roles, and some others, can be found in the Ansible Galaxy at https://galaxy.ansible.com/list#/users/1375.

Patrik is also a technical reviewer of Learning Ansible and the author of the Zabbix cookbook. Both the books are published by Packt Publishing.