Book Image

Learning Ansible 2 - Second Edition

Book Image

Learning Ansible 2 - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Ansible is an open source automation platform that assists organizations with tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and task automation. With Ansible, even complex tasks can be handled easier than before. In this book, you will learn about the fundamentals and practical aspects of Ansible 2 by diving deeply into topics such as installation (Linux, BSD, and Windows Support), playbooks, modules, various testing strategies, provisioning, deployment, and orchestration. In this book, you will get accustomed with the new features of Ansible 2 such as cleaner architecture, task blocks, playbook parsing, new execution strategy plugins, and modules. You will also learn how to integrate Ansible with cloud platforms such as AWS. The book ends with the enterprise versions of Ansible, Ansible Tower and Ansible Galaxy, where you will learn to interact Ansible with different OSes to speed up your work to previously unseen levels By the end of the book, you’ll able to leverage the Ansible parameters to create expeditious tasks for your organization by implementing the Ansible 2 techniques and paradigms.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Ansible 2 Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Working with playbooks


Playbooks are one of the core features of Ansible and tell Ansible what to execute. They are like a to-do list for Ansible that contains a list of tasks; each task internally links to a piece of code called a module. Playbooks are simple, human-readable YAML files, whereas modules are a piece of code that can be written in any language with the condition that its output be in the JSON format. You can have multiple tasks listed in a playbook and these tasks would be executed serially by Ansible. You can think of playbooks as an equivalent of manifests in Puppet, states in Salt, or cookbooks in Chef; they allow you to enter a list of tasks or commands you want to execute on your remote system.

Studying the anatomy of a playbook

Playbooks can have a list of remote hosts, user variables, tasks, handlers, and so on. You can also override most of the configuration settings through a playbook. Let's start looking at the anatomy of a playbook.

The purpose of the playbook we are...