Introduction to Ansible Playbooks and Roles

According to Wikipedia, Ansible is an open source automation engine that automates software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. But you already knew that. This book is about taking the idea of IT automation software and applying it to the domain of Information Security Automation. 

The book will take you through the journey of security automation to show how Ansible is used in the real world. 

In this book, we will be automating security-related tasks in a structured, modular fashion using a simple human-readable format YAML. Most importantly, what you will learn to create will be repeatable. This means once it is done, you can focus on fine-tuning, expanding the scope, and so on. The tool ensures that we can build and tear down anything, from simple application stacks to simple, but extensive, multi-application frameworks working together. 

If you have been playing around with Ansible, and in this book we assume you have, you would have definitely come across some of the following terms:

• Playbook
• Ansible Modules 
• YAML
• Roles
• Templates (Jinja2)

Don't worry, we will address all of the aforementioned terms in this chapter. Once you are comfortable with these topics, we will move on to covering scheduler tools, and then to building security automation playbooks.