Ansible Playbook Essentials

Design automation blueprints using Ansible’s playbooks to orchestrate and manage your multitier 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 coordinated 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 the application development workflow
• Orchestrate infrastructure and deploy applications in a coordinated manner

In Detail

This book will show you how to write a blueprint of your infrastructure, encompassing multitier applications using Ansible’s playbooks. Beginning with 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 about other nodes in the cluster, managing multiple environments with isolated configurations, and orchestrate infrastructure and deploy applications in a coordinated manner.

By the end of this book, you will be able to design solutions to your automation and orchestration problems using playbooks quickly and efficiently.

Table of Contents

Setting Up the Learning Environment
Chapter 1: Blueprinting Your Infrastructure
Chapter 2: Going Modular with Ansible Roles
Chapter 3: Separating Code and Data – Variables, Facts, and Templates
Chapter 4: Bringing In Your Code – Custom Commands and Scripts
Chapter 5: Controlling Execution Flow – Conditionals
Chapter 6: Iterative Control Structures – Loops
Chapter 7: Node Discovery and Clustering
Chapter 8: Encrypting Data with Vault
Chapter 9: Managing Environments
Chapter 10: Orchestrating Infrastructure with Ansible