Ansible Playbook Essentials

Design automation blueprints using Ansible's playbooks to orchestrate and manage your multi-tier infrastructure About This Book Get to grips with Ansible's features such as orchestration, automatic node discovery, and data encryption Create data-driven, modular and reusable automation code with Ansible roles, facts, variables, and templates A step-by-step approach to automating and managing system and application configurations effectively using Ansible's playbooks Who This Book Is For If you are a systems or automation engineer who intends to automate common infrastructure tasks, deploy applications, and use orchestration to configure systems in a co-ordinated manner, then this book is for you. Some understanding of the Linux/UNIX command line interface is expected. 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 application development workflow Orchestrate infrastructure and deploy applications in a coordinated manner In Detail Ansible combines configuration management, orchestration, and parallel command execution into a single tool. Its batteries-included approach and built-in module library makes it easy to integrate it with cloud platforms, databases, and notification services without requiring additional plugins. Playbooks in Ansible define the policies your systems under management enforce. They facilitate effective configuration management rather than running ad hoc scripts to deploy complex applications. This book will show you how to write a blueprint of your infrastructure encompassing multi-tier applications using Ansible's playbooks. Beginning with the basic concepts such as plays, tasks, handlers, inventory, and the YAML syntax that Ansible uses, you will see how to organize your code into a modular structure. Building on this, you will master techniques to create data-driven playbooks with variables, templates, logical constructs, and encrypted data. This book will also take you through advanced clustering concepts such as discovering topology information, managing multiple environments, and orchestration. By the end of this book, you will be able to design solutions to your automation and orchestration problems using playbooks quickly and efficiently. Style and approach This book follows a step-by-step approach, with the concepts explained in a conversational and easy-to-follow style. Each topic is explained sequentially in the process of creating a course. A comprehensive explanation of the basic and advanced features of Ansible playbooks is also included.

Among the many configuration management tools available, Ansible has some distinct advantages—it’s minimal in nature, you don’t need to install anything on your nodes, and it has an easy learning curve. This practical guide shows you how to be productive with this tool quickly, whether you’re a developer deploying code to production or a system administrator looking for a better automation solution. Author Lorin Hochstein shows you how to write playbooks (Ansible’s configuration management scripts), manage remote servers, and explore the tool’s real power: built-in declarative modules. You’ll discover that Ansible has the functionality you need and the simplicity you desire. Understand how Ansible differs from other configuration management systems Use the YAML file format to write your own playbooks Learn Ansible’s support for variables and facts Work with a complete example to deploy a non-trivial application Use roles to simplify and reuse playbooks Make playbooks run faster with ssh multiplexing, pipelining, and parallelism Deploy applications to Amazon EC2 and other cloud platforms Use Ansible to create Docker images and deploy Docker containers

This book is your concise guide to Ansible, the simple way to automate apps and IT infrastructure. In less than 250 pages, this book takes you from knowing nothing about configuration management to understanding how to use Ansible in a professional setting. You will learn how to create an Ansible playbook to automatically set up an environment, ready to install an open source project. You’ll extract common tasks into roles that you can reuse across all your projects, and build your infrastructure on top of existing open source roles and modules that are available for you to use. You will learn to build your own modules to perform actions specific to your business. By the end you will create an entire cluster of virtualized machines, all of which have your applications and all their dependencies installed automatically. Finally, you'll test your Ansible playbooks. Ansible can do as much or as little as you want it to. Ansible: From Beginner to Pro will teach you the key skills you need to be an Ansible professional. You’ll be writing roles and modules and creating entire environments without human intervention in no time at all – add it to your library today. What You Will Learn Learn why Ansible is so popular and how to download and install it Create a playbook that automatically downloads and installs a popular open source project Use open source roles to complete common tasks, and write your own specific to your business Extend Ansible by writing your own modules Test your infrastructure using Test Kitchen and ServerSpec Who This Book Is For Developers that currently create development and production environments by hand. If you find yourself running apt-get install regularly, this book is for you. Ansible adds reproducibility and saves you time all at once. Ansible: From Beginner to Pro is great for any developer wanting to enhance their skillset and learn new tools.

Design, develop, and solve real world automation and orchestration needs by unlocking the automation capabilities of Ansible About This Book Discover how Ansible works in detail Explore use cases for Ansible's advanced features including task delegation, fast failures, and serial task execution Extend Ansible with custom modules, plugins, and inventory sources Who This Book Is 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. What You Will Learn Understand Ansible's code and logic flow Safeguard sensitive data within Ansible Access and manipulate complex variable data within Ansible playbooks Handle task results to manipulate change and failure definitions Organize Ansible content into a simple structure Craft a multi-tier rollout playbook utilizing load balancers and manipulating your monitoring system Utilize advanced Ansible features to orchestrate rolling updates with almost no service disruptions Troubleshoot Ansible failures to understand and resolve issues Extend Ansible with custom modules, plugins, or inventory sources In Detail 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. Style and approach A clear, practical guide that covers best practise, system architecture and design aspects that will help you master Ansible with ease.

Design, develop, and solve real-world automation and orchestration problems by unlocking Ansible's automation capabilities Key FeaturesCompletely revised and updated for Ansible 4.0 and beyondTackle complex automation challenges with the newly added features in AnsibleLearn about the rapidly expanding field of network automation using Ansible, with the help of practical examples for configuring network devicesBook Description Ansible is a modern, YAML-based automation tool (built on top of Python, one of the world's most popular programming languages) with a massive and ever-growing user base. Its popularity and Python underpinnings make it essential learning for all in the DevOps space. This fourth edition of Mastering Ansible provides complete coverage of Ansible automation, from the design and architecture of the tool and basic automation with playbooks to writing and debugging your own Python-based extensions. You'll learn how to build automation workflows with Ansible's extensive built-in library of collections, modules, and plugins. You'll then look at extending the modules and plugins with Python-based code and even build your own collections — ultimately learning how to give back to the Ansible community. By the end of this Ansible book, you'll be confident in all aspects of Ansible automation, from the fundamentals of playbook design to getting under the hood and extending and adapting Ansible to solve new automation challenges. What you will learnGain an in-depth understanding of how Ansible works under the hoodGet to grips with Ansible collections and how they are changing and shaping the future of AnsibleFully automate the Ansible playbook executions with encrypted dataUse blocks to construct failure recovery or cleanupExplore the playbook debugger and Ansible consoleTroubleshoot unexpected behavior effectivelyWork with cloud infrastructure providers and container systemsWho this book is for If you are an Ansible developer or operator who has a detailed understanding of its core elements and applications but are now looking to enhance your skills in applying automation using Ansible, this book is for you. Prior experience working with core system administration tasks on Linux and basic familiarity with concepts such as cloud computing, containers, network devices, and fundamentals of a high-level programming language will help you make the most of this book.

Automate security-related tasks in a structured, modular fashion using the best open source automation tool available About This Book Leverage the agentless, push-based power of Ansible 2 to automate security tasks Learn to write playbooks that apply security to any part of your system This recipe-based guide will teach you to use Ansible 2 for various use cases such as fraud detection, network security, governance, and more Who This Book Is For If you are a system administrator or a DevOps engineer with responsibility for finding loop holes in your system or application, then this book is for you. It's also useful for security consultants looking to automate their infrastructure's security model. What You Will Learn Use Ansible playbooks, roles, modules, and templating to build generic, testable playbooks Manage Linux and Windows hosts remotely in a repeatable and predictable manner See how to perform security patch management, and security hardening with scheduling and automation Set up AWS Lambda for a serverless automated defense Run continuous security scans against your hosts and automatically fix and harden the gaps Extend Ansible to write your custom modules and use them as part of your already existing security automation programs Perform automation security audit checks for applications using Ansible Manage secrets in Ansible using Ansible Vault In Detail Security automation is one of the most interesting skills to have nowadays. Ansible allows you to write automation procedures once and use them across your entire infrastructure. This book will teach you the best way to use Ansible for seemingly complex tasks by using the various building blocks available and creating solutions that are easy to teach others, store for later, perform version control on, and repeat. We'll start by covering various popular modules and writing simple playbooks to showcase those modules. You'll see how this can be applied over a variety of platforms and operating systems, whether they are Windows/Linux bare metal servers or containers on a cloud platform. Once the bare bones automation is in place, you'll learn how to leverage tools such as Ansible Tower or even Jenkins to create scheduled repeatable processes around security patching, security hardening, compliance reports, monitoring of systems, and so on. Moving on, you'll delve into useful security automation techniques and approaches, and learn how to extend Ansible for enhanced security. While on the way, we will tackle topics like how to manage secrets, how to manage all the playbooks that we will create and how to enable collaboration using Ansible Galaxy. In the final stretch, we'll tackle how to extend the modules of Ansible for our use, and do all the previous tasks in a programmatic manner to get even more powerful automation frameworks and rigs. Style and approach This comprehensive guide will teach you to manage Linux and Windows hosts remotely in a repeatable and predictable manner. The book takes an in-depth approach and helps you understand how to set up complicated stacks of software with codified and easy-to-share best practices.

Design, develop, and solve real-world automation and orchestration problems by unlocking the automation capabilities of Ansible. Key FeaturesTackle complex automation challenges with the newly added features in Ansible 2.7Book Description Automation is essential for success in the modern world of DevOps. Ansible provides a simple, yet powerful, automation engine for tackling complex automation challenges. This book will take you on a journey that will help you exploit the latest version's advanced features to help you increase efficiency and accomplish complex orchestrations. This book will help you understand how Ansible 2.7 works at a fundamental level and will also teach you to leverage its advanced capabilities. Throughout this book, you will learn how to encrypt Ansible content at rest and decrypt data at runtime. Next, this book will act as an ideal resource to help you master the advanced features and capabilities required to tackle complex automation challenges. Later, it will walk you through workflows, use cases, orchestrations, troubleshooting, and Ansible extensions. Lastly, you will examine and debug Ansible operations, helping you to understand and resolve issues. By the end of the book, you will be able to unlock the true power of the Ansible automation engine and tackle complex, real- world actions with ease. What you will learnGain an in-depth understanding of how Ansible works under the hoodFully automate Ansible playbook executions with encrypted dataAccess and manipulate variable data within playbooksUse blocks to perform failure recovery or cleanupExplore the Playbook debugger and the Ansible ConsoleTroubleshoot unexpected behavior effectivelyWork with cloud infrastructure providers and container systemsDevelop custom modules, plugins, and dynamic inventory sourcesWho this book is for This book is for Ansible developers and operators who have an understanding of its core elements and applications but are now looking to enhance their skills in applying automation using Ansible.

Configure Ansible and start coding YAML playbooks using the appropriate modules Key FeaturesCreate and use Ansible Playbook to script and organise management tasksBenefit from the Ansible community roles and modules to resolve complex and niche tasksWrite configuration management code to automate infrastructureBook Description Configuration Management (CM) tools help administrators reduce their workload. Ansible is one of the best Configuration Management tools, and can act as an orchestrator for managing other CMs. This book is the easiest way to learn how to use Ansible as an orchestrator and a Configuration Management tool. With this book, you will learn how to control and monitor computer and network infrastructures of any size,physical or virtual. You will begin by learning about the Ansible client-server architecture. To get started, you will set up and configure an Ansible server. You will then go through the major features of Ansible: Playbook and Inventory. Then, we will look at Ansible systems and network modules. You will then use Ansible to enable infrastructure automated configuration management, followed by best practices for using Ansible roles and community modules. Finally, you will explore Ansible features such as Ansible Vault, Ansible Containers, and Ansible plugins. What you will learnImplement Playbook YAML scripts and its capacities to simplify day-to-day tasksSetup Static and Dynamic InventoryUse Ansible predefined modules for Linux, Windows, networking, and virtualisation administrationOrganize and configure the host filesystem using storage and files modulesImplement Ansible to enable infrastructure automated configuration managementSimplify infrastructure administrationSearch and install new roles and enable them within AnsibleSecure your data using Ansible VaultWho this book is for This book is targeted at System Administrators and Network Administrators who want to use Ansible to automate an infrastructure. No knowledge of Ansible is required.