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

Ansible as an orchestrator


When it comes to orchestration of any sort, Ansible really shines over other tools. Of course, as the creators of Ansible would say, it's more than a configuration management tool, which is true. Ansible can find a place for itself in any of the orchestration scenarios discussed earlier. It was designed to manage complex multitier deployments. Even if you have your infrastructure being automated with other configuration management tools, you can consider Ansible to orchestrate those.

Let's discuss the specific features that Ansible ships with, which are useful for orchestration.

Multiple playbooks and ordering

Unlike most other configuration management systems, Ansible supports running different playbooks at different times to configure or manage the same infrastructure. You can create one playbook to set up the application stack for the first time, and another to push updates over time in a certain manner. Another property of the playbook is that it can contain more...