To get the most out of this book

This book assumes that readers are already familiar with the basics of Ansible and the cloud provider they are going to work on. The book helps the readers to write infrastructure as code and automation. Readers will need a way to authenticate and authorize themselves to the desired cloud providers. Usually, that requires creating an account with said cloud provider. Although care has been taken to use trial and free-tier cloud providers wherever possible, certain recipes might cost users a small amount of money. Please be aware of the financial implications of that.

From a hardware point of view, any modern computer running 64-bit Linux flavor will be able to run the recipes. We have run these recipes from a single core 1 GB RAM compute instance.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

1. Log in or register at www.packtpub.com.
2. Select the SUPPORT tab.
3. Click on Code Downloads & Errata.
4. Enter the name of the book in the Search box and follow the onscreen instructions.

Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:

• WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows
• Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac
• 7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux

The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Ansible-2-Cloud-Automation-Cookbook. In case, there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/Ansible2CloudAutomationCookbook_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Once we have the credentials, we should put them in vars/secrets.yml."

A block of code is set as follows:

- name: Create Custom Network
  gce_net:
    name: my-network
    mode: custom
    subnet_name: "public-subnet"
    subnet_region: us-west1
    ipv4_range: '10.0.0.0/24'
    state: "present"
    service_account_email: "{{ service_account_email }}"
    project_id: "{{ project_id }}"
    credentials_file: "{{ credentials_file }}"
  tags:
   - recipe1

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ pip install boto

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "After that, from the left sidebar, select IAM & Admin and then go to the Service Accounts section."

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.