Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python

By : Bassem Aly
Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python

By: Bassem Aly

Overview of this book

Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python starts by covering the set up of a Python environment to perform automation tasks, as well as the modules, libraries, and tools you will be using. We’ll explore examples of network automation tasks using simple Python programs and Ansible. Next, we will walk you through automating administration tasks with Python Fabric, where you will learn to perform server configuration and administration, along with system administration tasks such as user management, database management, and process management. As you progress through this book, you’ll automate several testing services with Python scripts and perform automation tasks on virtual machines and cloud infrastructure with Python. In the concluding chapters, you will cover Python-based offensive security tools and learn how to automate your security tasks. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the skills of automating several system administration tasks with Python.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Ansible terminology

Ansible is an automation tool and a complete framework that provides an abstraction layer based on Python tools. Originally, it was designed to handle task automation. This task might be executed on a single server or on thousands of servers and ansible will handle them without any problem; later, Ansible's scope extended to network devices and cloud providers. Ansible follows the concept of idempotency, wherein Ansible instructions can run the same task multiple times and always give the same configuration on all devices at the end, reaching a desired state with minimal changes. For example, if we run Ansible to upload a file to a specific group of servers, then run it again, Ansible will first validate if the file already exist in the remote destination as a result a previous execution or not. if it exist, then the ansible won't upload it

again...