Book Image

Learning Ansible 2.7 - Third Edition

By : Fabio Alessandro Locati
Book Image

Learning Ansible 2.7 - Third Edition

By: Fabio Alessandro Locati

Overview of this book

Ansible is an open source automation platform that assists organizations with tasks such as application deployment, orchestration, and task automation. With the release of Ansible 2.7, even complex tasks can be handled much more easily than before. Learning Ansible 2.7 will help you take your first steps toward understanding the fundamentals and practical aspects of Ansible by introducing you to topics such as playbooks, modules, and the installation of Linux, Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), and Windows support. In addition to this, you will focus on various testing strategies, deployment, and orchestration to build on your knowledge. The book will then help you get accustomed to features including cleaner architecture, task blocks, and playbook parsing, which can help you to streamline automation processes. Next, you will learn how to integrate Ansible with cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) before gaining insights into the enterprise versions of Ansible, Ansible Tower and Ansible Galaxy. This will help you to use Ansible to interact with different operating systems and improve your working efficiency. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with the Ansible skills you need to automate complex tasks for your organization.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Creating a Web Server Using Ansible
4
Section 2: Deploying Playbooks in a Production Environment
9
Section 3: Deploying an Application with Ansible
13
Section 4: Deploying an Application with Ansible

Using AWX inventories

AWX inventories are the equivalent of Ansible inventories in the AWX world. Since AWX is a graphical tool, inventories are not stored as files (as done in Ansible) but will be manageable with the AWX user interface. Not being tied to a file also gives more flexibility to AWX inventories compared to Ansible inventories.

AWX has different ways to manage the inventories.

You can reach this by clicking the Inventories item on the left-hand menu, and you'll find something similar to this:

As for the projects, AWX comes with a demo inventory.

Looking from left to right, we can find the following columns:

  • A cloud symbol – for inventory synchronization status
  • The usual circle to show the status (okay or failed)
  • The inventory NAME
  • The inventory TYPE
  • The ORGANIZATION that owns the inventory
  • The edit symbol
  • The duplicate symbol
  • The delete symbol

As before...