Ansible Configuration Management

Leverage the power of Ansible to quickly configure your Linux infrastructure with ease

Overview

• Starts with the most simple usage of Ansible and builds on that
• Shows how to use Ansible to configure your Linux machines
• Teaches how to extend Ansible to add features you need
• Explains techniques for using Ansible in large, complex environments

In Detail

Ansible provides a clear and concise way to manage the configuration of your Linux infrastructure. It can help in making your infrastructure more maintainable, quicker to deploy, and easier to understand.

“Ansible Configuration Management” will take you from your very first command all the way to extending the very capabilities of Ansible itself. It takes a practical approach with hands-on examples, which ensures that the readers walk away with all the knowledge and skills they will need to harness Ansible.

“Ansible Configuration Management” starts with an explanation of the basics and builds the reader’s knowledge through step-by-step guidelines.

The book concentrates on discussions related to realistic worked examples. Using this approach we discuss how to perform ad-hoc actions, script actions together to set up services, and how to script more complicated tasks. The discussion carries onto explanation of organising your configurations for large deployments and warps up with examples of how to extend the capabilities of Ansible.

“Ansible Configuration Management” provides the knowledge you require to effectively manage your systems in a simple, quick, and maintainable way.

What you will learn from this book

• Configure your systems and services with Ansible
• Use Ansible command line tools to interrogate systems
• Script Ansible to perform multiple actions with one command
• Build maintainable configurations for large environments
• Learn how and when to use advanced features of Ansible
• Use an inventory that is dynamically generated
• Understand the use of Ansible roles to split your configurations into logical parts
• Extend the functionality of Ansible by writing your own module

Approach

“Ansible Configuration Management” is a step-by-step tutorial that teaches the use of Ansible for configuring Linux machines.

Who this book is written for

This book is intended for anyone looking to understand the basics of Ansible. It is expected that you will have some experience of how to set up and configure Linux machines. In parts of the book we cover configuration files of BIND, MySQL, and other Linux daemons, therefore a working knowledge of these would be helpful but are certainly not required.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Ansible
Chapter 2: Simple Playbooks
Chapter 3: Advanced Playbooks
Chapter 4: Larger Projects
Chapter 5: Custom Modules