Mastering Ansible

by Jesse Keating

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784395483
Publisher:	Packt Publishing
Publication date:	11/26/2015
Pages:	236
Sales rank:	578,216
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Jesse Keating is an accomplished Ansible user, contributor, and presenter. He has been an active member of the Linux and open source communities for over 15 years. He has first-hand experience with a variety of IT activities, software development, and large-scale system administration. He has presented at numerous conferences and meet-ups, and he has written many articles on a variety of topics.

His professional Linux career started with Pogo Linux as a Lead Linux Engineer handling many duties, including building and managing automated installation systems. For 7 years, Jesse served at the Fedora Release Engineer as a senior software engineer at Red Hat. In 2012, he joined Rackspace to help manage Rackspace's public Cloud product, where he introduced the use of Ansible for the large-scale automation and orchestration of OpenStack-powered Clouds. Currently, he is a senior software engineer and the OpenStack release lead at Blue Box, an IBM company, where he continues to utilize Ansible to deploy and manage OpenStack Clouds.

He has worked as technical editor on Red Hat Fedora and Enterprise Linux 4 Bible, A Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4th Edition, Python: Create-Modify-Reuse, and Practical Virtualization Solutions: Virtualization from the Trenches. He has also worked as a contributing author on Linux Toys II, and Linux Troubleshooting Bible. You can find Jesse on Twitter using the handle @iamjkeating, and find his musings that require more than 140 characters on his blog at https://derpops.bike.