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Mastering Ansible
Mastering Ansible

Mastering Ansible: Design, develop, and solve real world automation and orchestration needs by unlocking the automation capabilities of Ansible

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Mastering Ansible

Chapter 2. Protecting Your Secrets with Ansible

Secrets are meant to stay secret. Whether they are login credentials to a cloud service or passwords to database resources, they are secret for a reason. Should they fall into the wrong hands, they can be used to discover trade secrets and private customer data, create infrastructure for nefarious purposes, or worse. All of which could cost you or your organization a lot of time and money and cause a headache! In this chapter, we cover how to keep your secrets safe with Ansible.

  • Encrypting data at rest
  • Protecting secrets while operating

Encrypting data at rest

As a configuration management system or an orchestration engine, Ansible has great power. In order to wield that power, it is necessary to entrust secret data to Ansible. An automated system that prompts the operator for passwords all the time is not very efficient. To maximize the power of Ansible, secret data has to be written to a file that Ansible can read and utilize the data from within.

This creates a risk though! Your secrets are sitting there on your filesystem in plain text. This is a physical and digital risk. Physically, the computer could be taken from you and pawed through for secret data. Digitally, any malicious software that can break the boundaries set upon it could read any data your user account has access to. If you utilize a source control system, the infrastructure that houses the repository is just as much at risk.

Thankfully, Ansible provides a facility to protect your data at rest. That facility is Vault, which allows for encrypting text...

Protecting secrets while operating

In the previous section of this chapter, we covered protecting your secrets at rest on the filesystem. However, that is not the only concern while operating Ansible with secrets. Secret data is going to be used in tasks as module arguments or loop inputs or any number of other things. This may cause the data to be transmitted to remote hosts, logged to local or remote log files, or displayed on screen. This section of the chapter discusses strategies for protecting your secrets during operation.

Secrets transmitted to remote hosts

As we learned in Chapter 1, System Architecture and Design of Ansible, Ansible will combine module code and arguments and write this out to a temporary directory on the remote host. This means your secret data is transferred over the wire AND written to the remote filesystem. Unless you are using a connection plugin other than ssh, the data over the wire is already encrypted, preventing your secrets from being discovered by simple...

Summary

Ansible can deal with sensitive data. It is important to understand how this data is stored at rest and how this data is treated when utilized. With a little care and attention, Ansible can keep your secrets secret. Encrypting secrets with ansible-vault can protect them while dormant on your filesystem or in a shared source control repository. Preventing Ansible from logging task data can protect against leaking data to remote log files or on-screen displays.

In the next chapter, we will explore the powers of the Jinja2 templating engine used by Ansible.

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Description

Automation is critical to success in the world of DevOps. How quickly and efficiently an application deployment can be automated, or a new infrastructure can be built up, can be the difference between a successful product or a failure. Ansible provides a simple yet powerful automation engine. Beyond the basics of Ansible lie a host of advanced features which are available to help you increase efficiency and accomplish complex orchestrations with ease. This book provides you with the knowledge you need to understand how Ansible works at a fundamental level and leverage its advanced capabilities. You'll learn how to encrypt Ansible content at rest and decrypt data at runtime. You will master the advanced features and capabilities required to tackle the complex automation challenges of today and beyond. You will gain detailed knowledge of Ansible workflows, explore use cases for advanced features, craft well thought out orchestrations, troubleshoot unexpected behaviour, and extend Ansible through customizations. Finally, you will discover the methods used to examine and debug Ansible operations, helping you to understand and resolve issues.

Who is this book for?

This book is intended for Ansible developers and operators who have an understanding of the core elements and applications but are now looking to enhance their skills in applying automation using Ansible.
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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Nov 24, 2015
Length: 236 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781784395483
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Red Hat
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Publication date : Nov 24, 2015
Length: 236 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781784395483
Vendor :
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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
1. System Architecture and Design of Ansible Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Protecting Your Secrets with Ansible Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Unlocking the Power of Jinja2 Templates Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Controlling Task Conditions Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Composing Reusable Ansible Content with Roles Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Minimizing Downtime with Rolling Deployments Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Troubleshooting Ansible Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Extending Ansible Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Top Reviews
Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.6
(15 Ratings)
5 star 73.3%
4 star 20%
3 star 0%
2 star 6.7%
1 star 0%
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Michael S. May 19, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I've been using Ansible for awhile now, but this book took my skills to the next level. Concise and well-written.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Tim Crothers Dec 15, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Excellent resource on Ansible. I've read a number of documents and books on ansible and this one does by far the best job of explaining the depth and breadth of how to implement and leverage ansible for taking automation to a deep level. When I initially read the book I had a basic familiarity with using Ansible for automation. When I finished the book I had a much deeper level of understanding which allowed me to build several more complex use case in my production environment. Highly recommended.
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RAJIV LODHA Nov 19, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
excellent
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Adam J Miller Dec 26, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Absolutely amazing book, very well written in a way that can be approached by anyone with a base line level of understanding of Ansible and are looking to take their knowledge to the next level. The book's author very clearly has extensive experience in the topic space and shares his knowledge with the reader. I would absolutely recommend this to anyone who wants an advanced understanding of Ansible. This is a wonderful book to read cover to cover as well as keep around as a reference.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Winston Jan 20, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Absolutely a must buy for anyone looking to automate their business processes. It is very clear from the start that the authors are practitioners of this amazing software. Organizations of all types can benefit both from the use of the software and this book.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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