Practical Ansible 2: Automate infrastructure, manage configuration, and deploy applications with Ansible 2.9

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Ansible enables you to easily deploy applications and systems consistently and repeatably using native communication protocols such as SSH and WinRM. Perhaps most importantly, Ansible is agentless and so requires nothing to be installed on the managed systems (except for Python, which, these days, is present on most systems). As a result, it enables you to build a simple yet robust automation platform for your environment.

Ansible is simple and straightforward to install and comes packaged for most modern systems. Its architecture is serverless as well as agentless, and so it has a minimal footprint. You can choose to run it from a central server or your own laptop—the choice is entirely yours. You can manage anything from a single host to hundreds of thousands of remote hosts from one Ansible control machine. All remote machines can be (with sufficient playbooks being written) managed by Ansible, and with everything created correctly, you may never have to log in to any of these machines individually again.

In this chapter, we will begin to teach you the practical skills to cover the very fundamentals of Ansible, starting with how to install Ansible on a wide variety of operating systems. We will then look at how to configure Windows hosts to enable them to be managed with Ansible automation, before delving into greater depth on the topic of how Ansible connects to its target hosts. We'll then look at node requirements and how to validate your Ansible installation, before finally looking at how to obtain and run the very latest Ansible source code if you wish to either contribute to its development or gain access to the very latest of features.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

Installing and configuring Ansible
Understanding your Ansible installation
Running from source versus pre-built RPMs

Key benefits

Use Ansible 2.9 to automate and control your infrastructure

Delve into advanced functionality such as plugins and custom modules in Ansible

Automate and orchestrate major cloud platforms such as OpenStack, AWS, and Azure using Ansible

Description

Ansible enables you to automate software provisioning, configuration management, and application roll-outs, and can be used as a deployment and 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 Ansible 2.9 and learn 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 get to grips with concepts such as playbooks, inventories, and network modules. As you progress, you'll gain insight into the YAML syntax and learn how to port between Ansible versions. In addition to this, you'll also 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 just about all of your IT challenges, from infrastructure-as-code provisioning to application deployments, and even handling the mundane day-to-day maintenance tasks that take up so much valuable time.

What you will learn

Become familiar with the fundamentals of the Ansible framework

Set up role-based variables and dependencies

Avoid common mistakes and pitfalls when writing automation code in Ansible

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

What do you get with a Packt Subscription?

Free for first 7 days. $19.99 p/m after that. Cancel any time!

Unlimited ad-free access to the largest independent learning library in tech. Access this title and thousands more!

50+ new titles added per month, including many first-to-market concepts and exclusive early access to books as they are being written.

Innovative learning tools, including AI book assistants, code context explainers, and text-to-speech.

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Tim Jul 10, 2021

Really good actually. I’ve been learning ansible off and on for the last few months so know some of the basics. This helps take me to the next level, with a section for example on best practices

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Bubba Oct 27, 2020

I like the style of writing here, it's not bril, but it's not too wordy. This is what a your mentor would show you, a good balance of not too much not too little, a broad shallow introduction to the features of Ansible. The pointers to official doc where very helpful to me. Having already found a lot of information there using individual searches and not really finding the index so helpful, I now see there there is a little button for "Traditional index" that points to subtopics. Other links pointed down into other document pages.This book is probable perfect for someone with reasonable experience. It was what I needed as a second book to get a good look at the ecosystem and a second opinion of how to use it. The words aren't always quite correct, but you get the point. I don't blame the authors, the publisher clearly didn't do much work on this. And that is at the heart of the problem with this book. But I was able to get in touch with Packt so they might fix it; at least the formatting.The formatting seems fine on a Kindle or the app. But in the Cloud Reader, when there are bulleted lists the format is indented to the point were you get only one word or letter on a line. To mitigate this you can make your browser very wide. You can then get workable lines of text until the formatting gets right and you can make the browser reasonable again.

Alan Griffith Jul 17, 2020

I'm studying for ex294 and wanted a good overview in my kindle library. I have some experience so, some of it's kinda basic, but I've learned from it too. If they could fix the formatting issues, that would be great. As the content goes further in a section the column of text gets narrower and narrower. So far it's still usable by adjusting text width.

Alexander Javoronkov Aug 06, 2022

Part 2, the "Understanding the Fundamentans of Ansible", didn't cut it for me, the O'Reilly book did a tremendous job, though.The "network device automation" chapter did give some good examples not found in other books, though.

incognito Jan 24, 2021

The book content is OK, although at times a little difficult to follow grammatically , personally I think once the author had finished the writing someone should have gone through it and improved the grammar.. also I found the book full of typo's. I suppose these days everyone expects to use a spell checker, so long as a word is spelt correctly it will pass, no matter that it's the wrong word. A professional proof reader would have picked these up, and probably suggested changes to the grammar too.

Practical Ansible 2: Automate infrastructure, manage configuration, and deploy applications with Ansible 2.9

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