Ansible

Among the many configuration management tools available, Ansible has some distinct advantages: It's minimal in nature. You don't need to install agents on your nodes. And there's an easy learning curve. With this updated third edition, you'll quickly learn how to be productive with Ansible whether you're a developer deploying code or a system administrator looking for a better automation solution.

Authors Bas Meijer, Lorin Hochstein, and Rene Moser show you how to write playbooks (Ansible's configuration management scripts), manage remote servers, and explore the tool's real power: built-in declarative modules. You'll learn how Ansible has all the functionality you need--and the simplicity you desire.

• Explore Ansible configuration management and deployment
• Manage Linux, Windows, and network devices
• Learn how to apply Ansible best practices
• Understand how to use the new collections format
• Create custom modules and plug-ins
• Generate reusable Ansible content for open source middleware
• Build container images, images for cloud instances, and cloud infrastructure
• Automate CI/CD development environments
• Learn how to use Ansible Automation Platform for DevOps

Ansible empowers you to automate a myriad of tasks, including software provisioning, configuration management, infrastructure deployment, and application rollouts. It can be used as a deployment tool as well as an orchestration tool. While Ansible provides simple yet powerful features to automate multi-layer environments using agentless communication, it can also solve other critical IT challenges, such as ensuring continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) with zero downtime.

In this book, you'll work with the latest release of Ansible and learn how to solve complex issues quickly with the help of task-oriented scenarios. You'll start by installing and configuring Ansible on Linux and macOS to automate monotonous and repetitive IT tasks and learn concepts such as playbooks, inventories, and roles. As you progress, you'll gain insight into the YAML syntax and learn how to port between Ansible versions. Additionally, you'll understand how Ansible enables you to orchestrate multi-layer environments such as networks, containers, and the cloud.

By the end of this Ansible book, you'll be well versed in writing playbooks and other related Ansible code to overcome all your IT challenges, from infrastructure-as-a-code provisioning to application deployments and handling mundane day-to-day maintenance tasks.

What you will learn

• Explore the fundamentals of the Ansible framework
• Understand how collections enhance your automation efforts
• Avoid common mistakes and pitfalls when writing automation code
• Extend Ansible by developing your own modules and plugins
• Contribute to the Ansible project by submitting your own code
• Follow best practices for working with cloud environment inventories
• Troubleshoot issues triggered during Ansible playbook runs

Who this book is for

This book is for DevOps engineers, administrators, or any IT professionals looking to automate IT tasks using Ansible. Prior knowledge of Ansible is not a prerequisite.