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

Software distribution strategy


Deploying applications is probably one of the most complex tasks in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field. This is mainly caused by the fact that it often requires changing the state of the majority of machines that are somehow part of that application. In fact, often you find yourself having to change the state of load balancers, distribution servers, application servers, and database servers all at the same time during a deployment. New technologies, like containers, are trying to make those operations simpler, but often is not easy or possible to just move a legacy application to a container.

What we are now going to see are the various software distribution strategies and how Ansible can help with each one.

Copying files from the local machine

This is probably the oldest strategy to distribute software. The idea is to have the files on the local machine (often used to develop the code) and as soon as the change is made, a copy of the file...