Practical Ansible: Learn how to automate infrastructure, manage configuration, and deploy applications, 2nd Edition

Leverage the power of Ansible to gain complete control over your systems and automate deployments along with implementing configuration changes

Key Features

• Orchestrate major cloud platforms such as OpenStack, AWS, and Azure
• Use Ansible to automate network devices
• Automate your containerized workload with Docker, Podman, or Kubernetes
• Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook

Book Description
Ansible empowers you to automate a myriad of tasks, including software provisioning, configuration management, infrastructure deployment, and application rollouts. It can be used as a deployment tool as well as an 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 the latest release of Ansible and learn how 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 learn concepts such as playbooks, inventories, and roles. As you progress, you'll gain insight into the YAML syntax and learn how to port between Ansible versions. Additionally, you'll 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 all your IT challenges, from infrastructure-as-a-code provisioning to application deployments and handling mundane day-to-day maintenance tasks.

What you will learn

• Explore the fundamentals of the Ansible framework
• Understand how collections enhance your automation efforts
• Avoid common mistakes and pitfalls when writing automation code
• 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

Who this book is for
This book is for DevOps engineers, administrators, or any IT professionals looking to automate IT tasks using Ansible. Prior knowledge of Ansible is not a prerequisite.

Table of Contents

• Getting Started with Ansible
• Understanding the Fundamentals of Ansible
• Defining Your Inventory
• Playbooks and Roles
• Creating and Consuming Modules
• Creating and Consuming Collections
• Creating and Consuming Plugins
• Coding Best Practices
• Advanced Ansible Topics
• Network Automation with Ansible
• Container and Cloud Management
• Troubleshooting and Testing Strategies
• Getting Started with Ansible Automation Controller
• Execution Environments