Book Image

Mastering Ansible, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Jesse Keating
Book Image

Mastering Ansible, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Jesse Keating

Overview of this book

This book provides you with the knowledge you need to understand how Ansible 2.1 works at a fundamental level and leverage its advanced capabilities. You'll learn how to encrypt Ansible content at rest and decrypt data at runtime. You will master the advanced features and capabilities required to tackle the complex automation challenges of today and beyond. You will gain detailed knowledge of Ansible workflows, explore use cases for advanced features, craft well thought out orchestrations, troubleshoot unexpected behaviour, and extend Ansible through customizations. Finally, you will discover the methods used to examine and debug Ansible operations, helping you to understand and resolve issues. By the end of the book, the readers will be able to unlock the true power of the Ansible automation engine and will tackle complex real world actions with ease.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Mastering Ansible - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Encrypting data at rest


As a configuration management system or an orchestration engine, Ansible has great power. In order to wield that power, it is necessary to entrust secret data to Ansible. An automation system that prompts the operator for passwords each connection is not very efficient. To maximize the power of Ansible, secret data has to be written to a file that Ansible can read and utilize the data from within.

This creates a risk though! Your secrets are sitting there on your filesystem in plain text. This is a physical and digital risk. Physically, the computer could be taken from you and pawed through for secret data. Digitally, any malicious software that can break the boundaries set upon it could read any data your user account has access to. If you utilize a source control system, the infrastructure that houses the repository is just as much at risk.

Thankfully, Ansible provides a facility to protect your data at rest. That facility is Vault. This facility allows for encrypting...