What this book covers
Chapter 1, Installing and Running Ansible, discusses the problems Ansible was developed to solve. After covering its background, we will work through installing Ansible on macOS and Linux. We will also discuss why there is no native Windows installer and cover installing Ansible on the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Chapter 2, Exploring Ansible Galaxy, discusses Ansible Galaxy, an online repository of community and vendor-contributed roles. In this chapter, we will discover some of the best roles available, how to use them, and how to create your role and have it hosted on Ansible Galaxy.
Chapter 3, The Ansible Commands, explains how we examine Ansible commands before writing and executing more advanced playbooks. Here, we will cover using the tools that make up Ansible.
Chapter 4, Deploying a LAMP Stack, discusses deploying a complete LAMP stack using the various core modules that ship with Ansible. We will target the Ubuntu machine that is running locally.
Chapter 5, Deploying WordPress, expands on the LAMP stack playbook, which we deployed in the previous chapter as our base. We will use Ansible to download, install, and configure WordPress – a popular CMS.
Chapter 6, Targeting Multiple Distributions, explains how we will adapt the playbook from the previous chapter so it can run against both Debian, which we have been targeting so far, and Red Hat-based Linux distributions.
Chapter 7, Ansible Windows Modules, explores the ever-growing collection of Ansible modules that support and interact with Windows-based servers.
Chapter 8, Ansible Network Modules, discusses network modules available from various vendors through Ansible Galaxy. Due to their requirements, we will only discuss the functionality of these modules.
Chapter 9, Moving to the Cloud, discusses how we can move from using local virtual machines to using Ansible to deploy network and compute resources in Microsoft Azure. Then, we will use the playbook from the previous chapters to install and configure a LAMP stack and WordPress.
Chapter 10, Building Out a Cloud Network, since we will have just launched a virtual machine in Microsoft Azure, moves on to Amazon Web Services; however, before launching any compute instances, we must create a network in which they can be hosted.
Chapter 11, Highly Available Cloud Deployments, continues our Amazon Web Services deployment. We will start deploying compute and storage services into the network we created in the previous chapter, and by the end of the chapter, we will have a highly available WordPress installation.
Chapter 12, Building Out a VMware Deployment, discusses the modules that allow you to interact with the various components of a typical VMware installation.
Chapter 13, Scanning Your Ansible Playbooks, provides practical examples of running two third-party tools, Checkov and KICS. These tools are designed to scan your Ansible playbook code for common mistakes and potential security problems.
Chapter 14, Hardening Your Servers Using Ansible, explains how to install and execute OpenSCAP. We will also automatically generate remediation Ansible playbooks and Bash scripts to resolve any problems found during the scan. We will also look at running WPScan and OWASP ZAP scans against the resources deployed using the playbooks from previous chapters.
Chapter 15, Using Ansible with GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps, will examine running our Ansible playbook books from these two CI/CD platforms. As neither has native Ansible support, we will discuss how to install and run Ansible to get the most out of the platforms.
Chapter 16, Introducing Ansible AWX and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, examines two web-based interfaces: we will discuss the commercial Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and then take a deep dive into deploying and configuring the open source Ansible AWX.
Chapter 17, Next Steps with Ansible, discusses how Ansible can be integrated into our day-to-day workflows, from interacting with collaboration services to troubleshooting your playbooks with the built-in debugger. We will also look at real-world examples of how I have used Ansible across organizations I have worked with.
