Book Image

Implementing DevOps with Ansible 2

By : Jonathan McAllister
Book Image

Implementing DevOps with Ansible 2

By: Jonathan McAllister

Overview of this book

Thinking about adapting the DevOps culture for your organization using a very simple, yet powerful automation tool, Ansible 2? Then this book is for you! In this book, you will start with the role of Ansible in the DevOps module, which covers fundamental DevOps practices and how Ansible is leveraged by DevOps organizations to implement consistent and simplified configuration management and deployment. You will then move on to the next module, Ansible with DevOps, where you will understand Ansible fundamentals and how Ansible Playbooks can be used for simple configuration management and deployment tasks. After simpler tasks, you will move on to the third module, Ansible Syntax and Playbook Development, where you will learn advanced configuration management implementations, and use Ansible Vault to secure top-secret information in your organization. In this module, you will also learn about popular DevOps tools and the support that Ansible provides for them (MYSQL, NGINX, APACHE and so on). The last module, Scaling Ansible for the enterprise, is where you will integrate Ansible with CI and CD solutions and provision Docker containers using Ansible. By the end of the book you will have learned to use Ansible to leverage your DevOps tasks.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Configuration Management Best Practices


Now that we have a basic understanding of Configuration Management's overarching purpose and how it can be leveraged in an enterprise, let's take a look at some best practices involved in Configuration Management. Configuration Management in the modern software enterprise comes in many forms. Some of the more popular tools for Configuration Management are listed as follows:

  • Ansible
  • Chef
  • Puppet
  • CFEngine

Solutions such as these are mostly open source options that provide ways to keep and maintain infrastructure in code form, or IaC (Infrastructure as Code). For those unfamiliar with IaC, here is a general definition from Wikipedia:

Infrastructure as Code is the process of managing and provisioning computing infrastructure (processes, bare-metal servers, virtual servers, and so on) and their configuration through machine-processable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or the use of interactive configuration tools.

So, from this definition...