Preface
Automation is the key to IT modernization, and using the right automation tool is a crucial step in the automation journey for organizations. Ansible is an open source automation software that you can use for automating most of your operations with IT and application infrastructure components including servers, storage, network, and application platforms. Ansible is one of the most well-known open source automation tools in the IT world right now and has strong community support, with more than 5,000 active contributors around the world.
Ansible is not a learn-by-reading technology. This book will help you to understand and practice the automation capabilities of Ansible with actual playbooks, configurations, and practical examples. It will help you to understand the basics of Ansible automation and slowly, you will learn how to use Ansible for automating your day-to-day tasks.
You will learn real-life IT automation use cases with practical examples, such as simple system reports, security scanning, and weekly rebooting Linux machines. After that, the book will teach you how to implement collaboration in Ansible automation and how to automate other devices and platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, network devices, VMware, AWS, and GCP. You will also learn how to use Ansible in a DevOps workflow with Jenkins integration and container and application management on Kubernetes. To expand your knowledge further on enterprise automation, the book will also teach you about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, secret management, and Ansible integration with other tools, such as Jira and ServiceNow. There are chapters in this book that cover how to automate non-supported devices and platforms using raw commands and API calls using Ansible. Before the book concludes, you will also explore the Ansible best practices for storing managed node information, variables, credentials, and playbooks for production environments.
Upon finishing Ansible for Real-Life Automation, you will have the skills to find automation use cases in your work environment and design and deploy automation solutions using Ansible.
