Book Image

Mastering Ansible. - Third Edition

By : James Freeman, Jesse Keating
Book Image

Mastering Ansible. - Third Edition

By: James Freeman, Jesse Keating

Overview of this book

Automation is essential for success in the modern world of DevOps. Ansible provides a simple, yet powerful, automation engine for tackling complex automation challenges. This book will take you on a journey that will help you exploit the latest version's advanced features to help you increase efficiency and accomplish complex orchestrations. This book will help you understand how Ansible 2.7 works at a fundamental level and will also teach you to leverage its advanced capabilities. Throughout this book, you will learn how to encrypt Ansible content at rest and decrypt data at runtime. Next, this book will act as an ideal resource to help you master the advanced features and capabilities required to tackle complex automation challenges. Later, it will walk you through workflows, use cases, orchestrations, troubleshooting, and Ansible extensions. Lastly, you will examine and debug Ansible operations, helping you to understand and resolve issues. By the end of the book, you will be able to unlock the true power of the Ansible automation engine and tackle complex, real- world actions with ease.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Ansible Overview and Fundamentals
6
Section 2: Writing and Troubleshooting Ansible Playbooks
12
Section 3: Orchestration with Ansible

Extending Ansible

It must be said that Ansible takes the "kitchen sink" approach to functionality and tries to provide, out of the box, every piece of functionality you might ever need. There are over 2,000 modules available for use within Ansible at the time of writing—1,200 more than when the last edition of this book was published! In addition to these, there is a rich plugin and filter architecture with numerous callback plugins, lookup plugins, filter plugins, and dynamic inventory plugins included.

In spite of this, there will always be cases where Ansible doesn't quite perform the tasks required, especially in large and complex environments, or ones where bespoke in-house systems have been developed. Luckily, the design of Ansible, coupled with its open source nature, makes it easy for anyone to extend it by developing their own features. It is also...