Ansible: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

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. With this updated second edition, you’ll learn 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.

Authors Lorin Hochstein and René Moser show 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.

• Manage Windows machines, and automate network device configuration
• Manage your fleet from your web browser with Ansible Tower
• Understand how Ansible differs from other configuration management systems
• Use the YAML file format to write your own playbooks
• Work with a complete example to deploy a non-trivial application
• Deploy applications to Amazon EC2 and other cloud platforms
• Create Docker images and deploy Docker containers with Ansible

This book is best read start to finish, with later chapters building on earlier ones. Because it’s written in a tutorial style, you can follow along on your own machine. Most examples focus on web applications.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Playbooks: A Beginning
Chapter 3. Inventory: Describing Your Servers
Chapter 4. Variables and Facts
Chapter 5. Introducing Mezzanine: Our Test Application
Chapter 6. Deploying Mezzanine with Ansible
Chapter 7. Roles: Scaling Up Your Playbooks
Chapter 8. Complex Playbooks
Chapter 9. Customizing Hosts, Runs, and Handlers
Chapter 10. Callback Plugins
Chapter 11. Making Ansible Go Even Faster
Chapter 12. Custom Modules
Chapter 13. Vagrant
Chapter 14. Amazon EC2
Chapter 15. Docker
Chapter 16. Debugging Ansible Playbooks
Chapter 17. Managing Windows Hosts
Chapter 18. Ansible for Network Devices
Chapter 19. Ansible Tower: Ansible for the Enterprise
Appendix A. SSH
Appendix B. Using IAM Roles for EC2 Credentials