Design automation blueprints using Ansible's playbooks to orchestrate and manage your multi-tier 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 co-ordinated 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 application development workflow Orchestrate infrastructure and deploy applications in a coordinated manner In Detail Ansible combines configuration management, orchestration, and parallel command execution into a single tool. Its batteries-included approach and built-in module library makes it easy to integrate it with cloud platforms, databases, and notification services without requiring additional plugins. Playbooks in Ansible define the policies your systems under management enforce. They facilitate effective configuration management rather than running ad hoc scripts to deploy complex applications. This book will show you how to write a blueprint of your infrastructure encompassing multi-tier applications using Ansible's playbooks. Beginning with the 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, managing multiple environments, and orchestration. By the end of this book, you will be able to design solutions to your automation and orchestration problems using playbooks quickly and efficiently. Style and approach This book follows a step-by-step approach, with the concepts explained in a conversational and easy-to-follow style. Each topic is explained sequentially in the process of creating a course. A comprehensive explanation of the basic and advanced features of Ansible playbooks is also included.

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. This practical guide shows you 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. Author Lorin Hochstein shows 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. Understand how Ansible differs from other configuration management systems Use the YAML file format to write your own playbooks Learn Ansible’s support for variables and facts Work with a complete example to deploy a non-trivial application Use roles to simplify and reuse playbooks Make playbooks run faster with ssh multiplexing, pipelining, and parallelism Deploy applications to Amazon EC2 and other cloud platforms Use Ansible to create Docker images and deploy Docker containers

This book is your concise guide to Ansible, the simple way to automate apps and IT infrastructure. In less than 250 pages, this book takes you from knowing nothing about configuration management to understanding how to use Ansible in a professional setting. You will learn how to create an Ansible playbook to automatically set up an environment, ready to install an open source project. You’ll extract common tasks into roles that you can reuse across all your projects, and build your infrastructure on top of existing open source roles and modules that are available for you to use. You will learn to build your own modules to perform actions specific to your business. By the end you will create an entire cluster of virtualized machines, all of which have your applications and all their dependencies installed automatically. Finally, you'll test your Ansible playbooks. Ansible can do as much or as little as you want it to. Ansible: From Beginner to Pro will teach you the key skills you need to be an Ansible professional. You’ll be writing roles and modules and creating entire environments without human intervention in no time at all – add it to your library today. What You Will Learn Learn why Ansible is so popular and how to download and install it Create a playbook that automatically downloads and installs a popular open source project Use open source roles to complete common tasks, and write your own specific to your business Extend Ansible by writing your own modules Test your infrastructure using Test Kitchen and ServerSpec Who This Book Is For Developers that currently create development and production environments by hand. If you find yourself running apt-get install regularly, this book is for you. Ansible adds reproducibility and saves you time all at once. Ansible: From Beginner to Pro is great for any developer wanting to enhance their skillset and learn new tools.

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.

Leverage the power of Ansible to gain complete control over your systems and automate application deployment Key FeaturesUse Ansible 2.9 to automate and control your infrastructureDelve into advanced functionality such as plugins and custom modules in AnsibleAutomate and orchestrate major cloud platforms such as OpenStack, AWS, and Azure using AnsibleBook Description Ansible enables you to automate software provisioning, configuration management, and application roll-outs, and can be used as a deployment and orchestration tool. While Ansible provides simple yet powerful features to automate multi-layer environments using agentless communication, it can also solve other critical IT challenges, such as ensuring continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) with zero downtime. In this book, you'll work with Ansible 2.9 and learn to solve complex issues quickly with the help of task-oriented scenarios. You'll start by installing and configuring Ansible on Linux and macOS to automate monotonous and repetitive IT tasks and get to grips with concepts such as playbooks, inventories, and network modules. As you progress, you'll gain insight into the YAML syntax and learn how to port between Ansible versions. In addition to this, you'll also understand how Ansible enables you to orchestrate multi-layer environments such as networks, containers, and the cloud. By the end of this Ansible book, you'll be well - versed in writing playbooks and other related Ansible code to overcome just about all of your IT challenges, from infrastructure-as-code provisioning to application deployments, and even handling the mundane day-to-day maintenance tasks that take up so much valuable time. What you will learnBecome familiar with the fundamentals of the Ansible frameworkSet up role-based variables and dependenciesAvoid common mistakes and pitfalls when writing automation code in AnsibleExtend Ansible by developing your own modules and pluginsContribute to the Ansible project by submitting your own codeFollow best practices for working with cloud environment inventoriesTroubleshoot issues triggered during Ansible playbook runsWho this book is for If you are a DevOps engineer, administrator, or any IT professional looking to automate IT tasks using Ansible, this book is for you. Prior knowledge of Ansible is not necessary.

Ansible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server--or thousands.

Automate security-related tasks in a structured, modular fashion using the best open source automation tool available About This Book Leverage the agentless, push-based power of Ansible 2 to automate security tasks Learn to write playbooks that apply security to any part of your system This recipe-based guide will teach you to use Ansible 2 for various use cases such as fraud detection, network security, governance, and more Who This Book Is For If you are a system administrator or a DevOps engineer with responsibility for finding loop holes in your system or application, then this book is for you. It's also useful for security consultants looking to automate their infrastructure's security model. What You Will Learn Use Ansible playbooks, roles, modules, and templating to build generic, testable playbooks Manage Linux and Windows hosts remotely in a repeatable and predictable manner See how to perform security patch management, and security hardening with scheduling and automation Set up AWS Lambda for a serverless automated defense Run continuous security scans against your hosts and automatically fix and harden the gaps Extend Ansible to write your custom modules and use them as part of your already existing security automation programs Perform automation security audit checks for applications using Ansible Manage secrets in Ansible using Ansible Vault In Detail Security automation is one of the most interesting skills to have nowadays. Ansible allows you to write automation procedures once and use them across your entire infrastructure. This book will teach you the best way to use Ansible for seemingly complex tasks by using the various building blocks available and creating solutions that are easy to teach others, store for later, perform version control on, and repeat. We'll start by covering various popular modules and writing simple playbooks to showcase those modules. You'll see how this can be applied over a variety of platforms and operating systems, whether they are Windows/Linux bare metal servers or containers on a cloud platform. Once the bare bones automation is in place, you'll learn how to leverage tools such as Ansible Tower or even Jenkins to create scheduled repeatable processes around security patching, security hardening, compliance reports, monitoring of systems, and so on. Moving on, you'll delve into useful security automation techniques and approaches, and learn how to extend Ansible for enhanced security. While on the way, we will tackle topics like how to manage secrets, how to manage all the playbooks that we will create and how to enable collaboration using Ansible Galaxy. In the final stretch, we'll tackle how to extend the modules of Ansible for our use, and do all the previous tasks in a programmatic manner to get even more powerful automation frameworks and rigs. Style and approach This comprehensive guide will teach you to manage Linux and Windows hosts remotely in a repeatable and predictable manner. The book takes an in-depth approach and helps you understand how to set up complicated stacks of software with codified and easy-to-share best practices.