Book Image

Ansible Quick Start Guide

By : Mohamed Alibi
Book Image

Ansible Quick Start Guide

By: Mohamed Alibi

Overview of this book

Configuration Management (CM) tools help administrators reduce their workload. Ansible is one of the best Configuration Management tools, and can act as an orchestrator for managing other CMs. This book is the easiest way to learn how to use Ansible as an orchestrator and a Configuration Management tool. With this book, you will learn how to control and monitor computer and network infrastructures of any size,physical or virtual. You will begin by learning about the Ansible client-server architecture. To get started, you will set up and configure an Ansible server. You will then go through the major features of Ansible: Playbook and Inventory. Then, we will look at Ansible systems and network modules. You will then use Ansible to enable infrastructure automated configuration management, followed by best practices for using Ansible roles and community modules. Finally, you will explore Ansible features such as Ansible Vault, Ansible Containers, and Ansible plugins.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Ansible configuration management coding standards


In this section, we are going to list several rules and methods to help with writing nice and clean playbooks in conformity with the Ansible norm. This is not a strict instruction to follow, but instead a representation of how Ansible developers and maintainers think it should be used. Following these norms does not just allow easier usage of playbooks, it also helps make it standard and understandable by the community members, therefore enabling better team collaboration.

Note

These standards are based on the experience of Ansible users and maintainers. Any individual user may use Ansible differently, in a way that would require a different set of rules.

Playbook and task naming

When making a playbook, using the name: field is optional. If you write a playbook with no name, it will work perfectly fine. The following is an example of a playbook that does not have a name:

---
- hosts: servers
  become: yes
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
    - apt...