Practical Ansible - Second Edition

 Published on September 29, 2023
 Authored by James Freeman, Fabio Alessandro Locati, Daniel Oh
 Published by Packt Publishing Limited
 Ansible

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.

Table of Contents

1. Getting Started with Ansible
2. Understanding the Fundamentals of Ansible
3. Defining Your Inventory
4. Playbooks and Roles
5. Creating and Consuming Modules
6. Creating and Consuming Collections
7. Creating and Consuming Plugins
8. Coding Best Practices
9. Advanced Ansible Topics
10. Network Automation with Ansible
11. Container and Cloud Management
12. Troubleshooting and Testing Strategies
13. Getting Started with Ansible Automation Controller
14. Execution Environments

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
• Become familiar with the fundamentals of the Ansible framework

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.