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 roles


We have seen how we can automate simple tasks, but what we have seen up till now will not solve all your problems. This is because playbooks are very good at executing operations, but are not very good for configuring huge amounts of machines, because they will soon become messy. To solve this, Ansible has roles.

My definition of a role is a set of playbooks, templates, files, or variables to achieve a specific goal. For instance, we could have a database role and a web server role so that those configurations stay cleanly separated.

Before starting to look inside a role, let's talk about a project organization.

Project organization

In the last few years, I've worked on multiple Ansible repositories for multiple organizations and many of them were very chaotic. To ensure that your repository is easy to manage, I'm going to give you a template that I always use.

First of all, I always create three files in the root folder:

  • ansible.cfg: A small configuration file to explain to...