Book Image

Security Automation with Ansible 2

By : Akash Mahajan, MADHU AKULA
Book Image

Security Automation with Ansible 2

By: Akash Mahajan, MADHU AKULA

Overview of this book

Security automation is one of the most interesting skills to have nowadays. Ansible allows you to write automation procedures once and use them across your entire infrastructure. This book will teach you the best way to use Ansible for seemingly complex tasks by using the various building blocks available and creating solutions that are easy to teach others, store for later, perform version control on, and repeat. We’ll start by covering various popular modules and writing simple playbooks to showcase those modules. You’ll see how this can be applied over a variety of platforms and operating systems, whether they are Windows/Linux bare metal servers or containers on a cloud platform. Once the bare bones automation is in place, you’ll learn how to leverage tools such as Ansible Tower or even Jenkins to create scheduled repeatable processes around security patching, security hardening, compliance reports, monitoring of systems, and so on. Moving on, you’ll delve into useful security automation techniques and approaches, and learn how to extend Ansible for enhanced security. While on the way, we will tackle topics like how to manage secrets, how to manage all the playbooks that we will create and how to enable collaboration using Ansible Galaxy. In the final stretch, we’ll tackle how to extend the modules of Ansible for our use, and do all the previous tasks in a programmatic manner to get even more powerful automation frameworks and rigs.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction to Ansible Playbooks and Roles
5
Automating Web Application Security Testing Using OWASP ZAP

Chapter 2. Ansible Tower, Jenkins, and Other Automation Tools

Ansible is powerful. Once you realize the innumerable benefits of writing down a way to configure and provision systems, you will never want to go back. In fact, you may want to go ahead and write playbooks for complex cloud environments to deploying stacks for data scientists. The rule of thumb is if you can script it, you can create a playbook for it. 

Let's assume that you have gone ahead and done just that. Build different playbooks for a variety of scenarios. If you see the advantages of codifying how infrastructure is built and provisioned, you will obviously want to put your playbooks under version control:

Multiple playbooks stored under version control, ready to be deployed to systems for provisioning

At this point, we have solved interesting challenges surrounding automation:

  • We now have the ability to replay commands against multiple targets
  • Remember that if the playbooks are in an idempotent manner, we can safely run them...