Traveling across space and time to make first contact, explorers discover a terrible predator. Now only a band of time travelers stand between humanity and the long dark. The previous Ansibles found themselves marooned, but Zahid, last survivor of "Ansible 15718," commands an interstellar fleet, and Sahira, the psionic savant we meet in "Ansible: Night Land" and "Ansible: Strike Force," will take the battle to the pneumavores, humanity's fiercest predators. In Season Two of Ansible, humanity's last conflict continues to blossom open, dark fire and dark flower, torching all of time and space. These are your descendants' stories. Their cries in the dark. PRAISE FOR ANSIBLE: "Litore's stories aren't only entertaining. They are stories invading our lives, unexpectedly. You encounter them, as you might encounter people. They are those random elements in life that happen to you, like a mugging, like childbirth, like falling in love and marriage, like death and the funeral that follows. They are moments that leave a mark, and leave you changed." - Andrew Hallam, Ph.D., Metropolitan State University of Denver "Stant eloquently writes passages that are so moving, full of passion, fury, loneliness, blind drive ... He takes us to places of amazing beauty, awe-inspiring, as well as places where the implications in the story can leave you almost in despair for the human race." - Nikki Ebright, Director, Myths & Legends Con

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

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

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.

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.

Run Ansible playbooks to launch complex multi-tier applications hosted in public clouds Key Features Build your learning curve using Ansible Automate cloud, network, and security infrastructures with ease Gain hands-on exposure on Ansible Book Description Ansible has grown from a small, open source orchestration tool to a full-blown orchestration and configuration management tool owned by Red Hat. Its powerful core modules cover a wide range of infrastructures, including on-premises systems and public clouds, operating systems, devices, and services—meaning it can be used to manage pretty much your entire end-to-end environment. Trends and surveys say that Ansible is the first choice of tool among system administrators as it is so easy to use. This end-to-end, practical guide will take you on a learning curve from beginner to pro. You'll start by installing and configuring the Ansible to perform various automation tasks. Then, we'll dive deep into the various facets of infrastructure, such as cloud, compute and network infrastructure along with security. By the end of this book, you'll have an end-to-end understanding of Ansible and how you can apply it to your own environments. What you will learn Write your own playbooks to configure servers running CentOS, Ubuntu, and Windows Identify repeatable tasks and write playbooks to automate them Define a highly available public cloud infrastructure in code, making it easy to distribute your infrastructure configuration Deploy and configure Ansible Tower and Ansible AWX Learn to use community contributed roles Use Ansible in your day-to-day role and projects Who this book is for Learn Ansible is perfect for system administrators and developers who want to take their current workflows and transform them into repeatable playbooks using Ansible. No prior knowledge of Ansible is required.

Learn everything you need to manage and handle your systems with ease with Ansible 2 using this comprehensive guide About This Book Simplify the automation of applications and systems using the newest version of Ansible Get acquainted with fundamentals of Ansible such as playbooks, modules, and various testing strategies A comprehensive, learning guide that provides you with great skills to automate your organization's infrastructure using Ansible 2 Who This Book Is For The book is for sys admins who want to automate their organization's infrastructure using Ansible 2. No prior knowledge of Ansible is required. What You Will Learn Set up Ansible 2 and an Ansible 2 project in a future-proof way Perform basic operations with Ansible 2 such as creating, copying, moving, changing, and deleting files, and creating and deleting users Deploy complete cloud environments using Ansible 2 on AWS and DigitalOcean Explore complex operations with Ansible 2 (Ansible vault, e-mails, and Nagios) Develop and test Ansible playbooks Write a custom module and test it In Detail Ansible is an open source automation platform that assists organizations with tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and task automation. With Ansible, even complex tasks can be handled easier than before. In this book, you will learn about the fundamentals and practical aspects of Ansible 2 by diving deeply into topics such as installation (Linux, BSD, and Windows Support), playbooks, modules, various testing strategies, provisioning, deployment, and orchestration. In this book, you will get accustomed with the new features of Ansible 2 such as cleaner architecture, task blocks, playbook parsing, new execution strategy plugins, and modules. You will also learn how to integrate Ansible with cloud platforms such as AWS. The book ends with the enterprise versions of Ansible, Ansible Tower and Ansible Galaxy, where you will learn to interact Ansible with different OSes to speed up your work to previously unseen levels By the end of the book, you'll able to leverage the Ansible parameters to create expeditious tasks for your organization by implementing the Ansible 2 techniques and paradigms. Style and approach This book is a step-by-step learning guide on the all new Ansible 2, which is an ideal configuration management tool.