Mastering Ansible

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.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: System Architecture and Design of Ansible
Chapter 2: Protecting Your Secrets with Ansible
Chapter 3: Unlocking the Power of Jinja2 Templates
Chapter 4: Controlling Task Conditions
Chapter 5: Composing Reusable Ansible Content with Roles
Chapter 6: Minimizing Downtime with Rolling Deployments
Chapter 7: Troubleshooting Ansible
Chapter 8: Extending Ansible