Learn Ansible Quickly

Master Ansible Automation and learn how to automate your apps deployment and IT infrastructure operations. Ansible is one of the most popular DevOps tools available in the IT market. Key Features Run Ansible Ad-Hoc commands. Deploy Files with Jinja2 templates. Create and run Ansible Playbooks. Use Ansible Vault to protect sensitive information. Use Ansible Galaxy to install and use Ansible roles. Learn various Ansible troubleshooting techniques. Book Description Learn Ansible Quickly is a fully practical hands-on guide for learning Ansible Automation. It will get you up and running with Ansible in no time. First, you will break the ice with Ansible by running very simple Ad-Hoc commands. Then, you will dive into the world of Ansible playbooks, variables, facts, registers, and loops. Also, you will learn how to use conditional statements in your Ansible playbooks. Moreover, you will explore how to use blocks to handle exceptions and failures in Ansible. In addition, you will get to install and use Ansible roles, so your playbooks look clean and unrepetitive. Finally, you will learn various troubleshooting techniques in Ansible. By the end of this book, you will have all the skills necessarily to develop state of the art Ansible playbooks that can automate any repetitive task you may encounter while working on Linux systems. What you will learn Run Ansible Ad-Hoc commands and Playbooks. Understand how to work with Ansible variables, Facts, Registers, and Loops. Make your Ansible Playbooks smarter with conditional statements. Use Blocks to handle exceptions and failures. Use Handlers to trigger tasks upon change. Who This Book Is For This book is an amazing preparation guide for anyone wants to pass the EX294 certification exam and become a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE). If you are tired of spending countless hours doing the same tedious task on Linux over and over again then this book is for you! Learn Ansible Quickly will teach you all the skills you need to automate borings tasks in Linux. You will be much more efficient working on Linux after reading this book, more importantly, you will get more sleep, I promise you! Learn Ansible Quickly does assume prior Linux knowledge (RHCSA Level) and that you have experience working on the Linux command line. Table of Contents Hello Ansible Running Ad-Hoc Commands Ansible Playbooks Ansible Variables, Facts, and Registers Ansible Loops Decision Making in Ansible Jinja2 Templates Ansible Vault Ansible Roles RHEL System Roles Managing Systems with Ansible Ansible Troubleshooting Final Sample Exam Knowledge Check Solutions

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

Ansible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server--or thousands.

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.

Run Ansible playbooks to launch complex multi-tier applications hosted in public clouds Key Features Build your learning curve using Ansible Automate cloud, network, and security infrastructures with ease Gain hands-on exposure on Ansible Book Description Ansible has grown from a small, open source orchestration tool to a full-blown orchestration and configuration management tool owned by Red Hat. Its powerful core modules cover a wide range of infrastructures, including on-premises systems and public clouds, operating systems, devices, and services—meaning it can be used to manage pretty much your entire end-to-end environment. Trends and surveys say that Ansible is the first choice of tool among system administrators as it is so easy to use. This end-to-end, practical guide will take you on a learning curve from beginner to pro. You'll start by installing and configuring the Ansible to perform various automation tasks. Then, we'll dive deep into the various facets of infrastructure, such as cloud, compute and network infrastructure along with security. By the end of this book, you'll have an end-to-end understanding of Ansible and how you can apply it to your own environments. What you will learn Write your own playbooks to configure servers running CentOS, Ubuntu, and Windows Identify repeatable tasks and write playbooks to automate them Define a highly available public cloud infrastructure in code, making it easy to distribute your infrastructure configuration Deploy and configure Ansible Tower and Ansible AWX Learn to use community contributed roles Use Ansible in your day-to-day role and projects Who this book is for Learn Ansible is perfect for system administrators and developers who want to take their current workflows and transform them into repeatable playbooks using Ansible. No prior knowledge of Ansible is required.

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.

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 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.