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

Understanding roles


In real-life scenarios, we will mostly be configuring web servers, database servers, load balancers, middleware queues, and so on. If you take one step back and look at the big picture, you will realize that you are configuring groups of identical servers in a repeatable fashion.

To manage such infrastructures in the most efficient way, we need some abstraction which allows us to define what we need to configure in each of these groups, and call them by name. That's exactly what roles do. Ansible roles allow us to configure groups of nodes at the same time, without repeating ourselves. Roles also provide a way to create modular code, which then can then be shared and reused.