Book Image

Ansible 2 Cloud Automation Cookbook

By : Aditya Patawari, Vikas Aggarwal
Book Image

Ansible 2 Cloud Automation Cookbook

By: Aditya Patawari, Vikas Aggarwal

Overview of this book

Ansible has a large collection of inbuilt modules to manage various cloud resources. The book begins with the concepts needed to safeguard your credentials and explain how you interact with cloud providers to manage resources. Each chapter begins with an introduction and prerequisites to use the right modules to manage a given cloud provider. Learn about Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other providers. Each chapter shows you how to create basic computing resources, which you can then use to deploy an application. Finally, you will be able to deploy a sample application to demonstrate various usage patterns and utilities of resources.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Managing GCE images

Images are a collection of a boot loader, operating system, and a root filesystem. There are public images provided by Google and various open source communities. We can use these images to create an instance. GCE also provides us capability to create our own image which we can use to boot instances.

It is important to understand the difference between an image and a snapshot. A snapshot is incremental but it is just a disk snapshot. Due to its incremental nature, it is better for creating backups. Images consist of more information such as a boot loader. Images are non-incremental in nature. However, it is possible to import images from a different cloud provider or datacenter to GCE.

Another reason we recommend snapshots for backup is that taking a snapshot does not require us to shut down the instance, whereas building an image would require us to shut down...