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Ansible Playbook Essentials
Ansible Playbook Essentials

Ansible Playbook Essentials: Design automation blueprints to manage your multitier infrastructure

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Ansible Playbook Essentials

Chapter 1. Blueprinting Your Infrastructure

This book is a primer for anyone who has conceptual knowledge of Ansible and would like to get started writing Ansible playbooks to automate common infrastructure tasks, orchestrate application deployments, and/or manage configurations across multiple environments. This book follows an incremental approach, starting with the basics such as learning about the anatomy of a playbook and writing simple roles to create modular code. Once comfortable with the basics, you will be introduced to primitives such as adding dynamic data with variables and templates, and controlling execution flow with conditionals and iterators. This is then followed by more advanced topics such as node discovery, clustering, encrypting data, and managing environments. We conclude with the discussion on the orchestration features of Ansible. Let's begin our journey towards being an Ansible practitioner by learning about playbooks.

In this chapter, we will learn...

Getting introduced to Ansible

Ansible is a simple, flexible, and extremely powerful tool that gives you the ability to automate common infrastructure tasks, run ad hoc commands, and deploy multitier applications spanning multiple machines. Even though you can use Ansible to launch commands on a number of hosts in parallel, the real power lies in managing those using playbooks.

As systems engineer, infrastructure that we typically need to automate contains complex multitier applications. Each of which represents a class of servers, for example, load balancers, web servers, database servers, caching applications, and middleware queues. Since many of these applications have to work in tandem to provide a service, there is topology involved as well. For example, a load balancer would connect to web servers, which in turn read/write to a database and connect to the caching server to fetch in-memory objects. Most of the time, when we launch such application stacks, we need to configure these...

Plays

A playbook consists of one or more plays, which map groups of hosts to well-defined tasks. The preceding example contains three plays, each to configure one layer in the multitiered web application. Plays also define the order in which tasks are configured. This allows us to orchestrate multitier deployments. For example, configure the load balancers only after starting the web servers, or perform two-phase deployment where the first phase only adds this configurations and the second phase starts the services in the desired order.

YAML – the playbook language

As you may have already noticed, the playbook that we wrote previously resembles more of a text configuration than a code snippet. This is because the creators of Ansible chose to use a simple, human-readable, and familiar YAML format to blueprint the infrastructure. This adds to Ansible's appeal, as users of this tool need not learn any special programming language to get started with. Ansible code is self-explanatory...

Our first playbook

Equipped with the basic rules explained previously and assuming readers have done a quick dive into YAML fundamentals, we will now begin writing our first playbook. Our problem statement includes the following:

  1. Create a devops user on all hosts. This user should be part of the devops group.
  2. Install the "htop" utility. Htop is an improved version of top—an interactive system process monitor.
  3. Add the Nginx repository to the web servers and start it as a service.

Now, we will create our first playbook and save it as simple_playbook.yml containing the following code:

---
- hosts: all
  remote_user: vagrant
  sudo: yes
  tasks:
  
  - group:
      name: devops
      state: present
  - name: create devops user with admin privileges
    
    user:
      name: devops
      comment: "Devops User"
      uid: 2001
      group: devops
  - name: install htop package
    action: apt name=htop state=present update_cache=yes

- hosts: www
  user: vagrant
  sudo...

Review questions

Do you think you've understood the chapter well enough? Try answering the following questions to test your understanding:

  1. What is idempotence when it comes to modules?
  2. What is the host's inventory and why is it required?
  3. Playbooks map ___ to ___ (fill in the blanks)
  4. What types of patterns can you use while selecting a list of hosts to run plays against?
  5. Where is the actual procedure to execute an action on a specific platform defined?
  6. Why is it said that Ansible comes with batteries included?

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about what Ansible playbooks are, what components those are made up of, and how to blueprint your infrastructure with it. We also did a primer on YAML—the language used to create plays. You learned about how plays map tasks to hosts, how to create a host inventory, how to filter hosts with patterns, and how to use modules to perform actions on our systems. We then created a simple playbook as a proof of concept.

In the upcoming chapter, we will start refactoring our code to create reusable and modular chunks of code, and call them roles.

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Description

Ansible Playbook Essentials will show you how to write a blueprint of your infrastructure, encompassing multitier applications using Ansible's playbooks. Beginning with basic concepts such as plays, tasks, handlers, inventory, and YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML) syntax that Ansible uses, you'll understand how to organize your code into a modular structure. Building on this, you will study techniques to create data-driven playbooks with variables, templates, logical constructs, and encrypted data, which will further strengthen your application skills in Ansible. Adding to this, the book will also take you through advanced clustering concepts, such as discovering topology information about other nodes in the cluster and managing multiple environments with isolated configurations. As you approach the concluding chapters, you can expect to learn about orchestrating infrastructure and deploying applications in a coordinated manner. By the end of this book, you will be able to design solutions to your automation and orchestration problems using playbooks quickly and efficiently.

Who is this book for?

If you are a systems or an automation engineer who wants to automate common infrastructure tasks, deploy applications, and use orchestration to configure systems in a synchronized manner, this book is ideal for you. Some familiarity with the Linux/Unix command-line interface is necessary.

What you will learn

  • Write simple tasks and plays
  • Organize code into a reusable, modular structure
  • Separate code from data using variables and Jinja2 templates
  • Run custom commands and scripts using Ansible s command modules
  • Control execution flow based on conditionals
  • Integrate nodes and discover topology information about other nodes in the cluster
  • Encrypt data with Ansible Vault
  • Create environments with isolated configurations to match the application development workflow
  • Orchestrate infrastructure and deploy applications in a coordinated manner
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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Aug 05, 2015
Length: 168 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781784398293
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Publication date : Aug 05, 2015
Length: 168 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781784398293
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Table of Contents

13 Chapters
Setting Up the Learning Environment Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
1. Blueprinting Your Infrastructure Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Going Modular with Ansible Roles Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Separating Code and Data – Variables, Facts, and Templates Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Bringing In Your Code – Custom Commands and Scripts Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Controlling Execution Flow – Conditionals Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Iterative Control Structures – Loops Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Node Discovery and Clustering Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Encrypting Data with Vault Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. Managing Environments Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. Orchestrating Infrastructure with Ansible Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
A. References Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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Thomas Jul 28, 2024
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Straight to the point
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CHRIS Sep 22, 2018
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The book flows well and was really interesting it would have been nice to see a chapter on networking but it was really good read.
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C. C Chin Dec 09, 2022
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Work uses Ansible
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Martin Oct 13, 2017
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Great book to push ansible further then just installing some packages.
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digitalshadow Mar 26, 2018
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If you're new to Ansible and are looking for a quick guide to get up to speed quickly, then this is the book for you. Clear, concise explanations and examples of the topics you need to know to get started with Ansible. Once you finish reading this book, you'll be ready for other books that go into more complex topics and applications of Ansible.
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