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

Provisioning resources in the cloud


With that, let's jump to the first topic. Teams managing infrastructures have a lot of choices today for running their builds, tests, and deployments. Providers such as Amazon, Rackspace, and DigitalOcean primarily provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). When we speak about IaaS, it's better to speak about resources not virtual machines for different reasons:

  • The majority of the products that those companies allow you to provision are not machines but other critical resources such as networking and storage

  • Lately, many of those companies have started to provide many different kind of compute instances ranging from bare-metal machines to containers

  • Setting up machines with no networking (or storage) could be all you need for some very simple environments, but might not be enough in production environments

Those companies usually provide API, CLI, GUI, and SDK utilities to create and manage cloud resources throughout their whole lifecycle. We're more interested...