Practical Ansible: Learn how to automate infrastructure, manage configuration, and deploy applications

Key Features

• Orchestrate major cloud platforms such as OpenStack, AWS, and Azure
• Use Ansible to automate network devices
• Automate your containerized workload with Docker, Podman, or Kubernetes
• Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook

Book Description

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.

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

James Freeman is an accomplished IT professional with over 25 years’ experience in the technology industry. He has more than a decade of first-hand experience in solving real-world enterprise problems in production environments using Ansible, open source, and AWS. As part of this work, he frequently introduces Ansible as a new technology to businesses and CTOs for the first time. In addition, he has co-authored five books and one video training course on Ansible, facilitated bespoke Ansible workshops and training sessions, and presented at both international conferences and meetups on Ansible.

Fabio Alessandro Locati – commonly known as Fale – is an EMEA associate principal solutions architect at Red Hat, a public speaker, an author, and an open source contributor. His primary areas of expertise are Linux, automation, security, and cloud technologies. Fale has more than 15 years of working experience in IT, with many of them spent consulting for various organizations, including dozens of Fortune 500 companies. Fale has written Learning Ansible 2.7, Learning Ansible 2, and OpenStack Cloud Security, and has been part of the review process of multiple books.

Daniel Oh is a principal technical marketing manager at Red Hat. He provides runtimes, frameworks, fast data access, and high-performance messaging in flexible, easy-to-use, cost-effective, open, and collaborative ways. He's also a CNCF ambassador and DevOps Institute ambassador who evangelizes how to design and develop cloud-native serverless microservices and deploy them to multi/hybrid cloud-native platforms based on CNCF projects. Daniel loves to share his developer experiences with DevOps folks in terms of how to evolve traditional microservices to cloud-native, event-driven, and serverless applications via technical workshops, brown bag sessions, hackathons, and hands-on labs across regions at many international conferences.