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 roles


This is the section in which we discover Ansible roles and what we can do with them to optimize our automation scripting.

What are Ansible roles?

The ultimate configuration management scripts optimization is to convert simple playbooks into Ansible roles. This gives you the ability to make a set of configuration management tasks modular and reusable, with multiple configurations. It also means that they can be easily shared when required. Ansible roles allow several related tasks, with their variables and dependencies, to be contained in a portable framework. This framework represents the breakdown of a complex playbook into multiple simple files.

An Ansible role is composed of multiple folders, each of which contain several YAML files. By default, they have a main.yml file, but they can have more than one when needed. This is a standardized structure for all Ansible roles, which allows Ansible playbooks to automatically load predefined variables, tasks, handlers, templates, and...