Beginning Ansible Concepts and Application Provisioning, Configuring, and Managing Servers, Applications, and Their Dependencies

Learn the concepts and develop the skills to be a true Ansible artist and use it inside and outside the box. This book applies key concepts immediately while building up your Ansible skills layer by layer through easy to grasp examples and engaging projects. You’ll also think about security, why testing is important, and how to use version control safely.

As a beginner to Ansible, you'll be guided step-by-step through creating your first Ansible playbook to deploying your first server and writing more complex cross-dependency playbooks. From the first line of code to the last, you'll constantly iterate and simplify your playbooks, iwhile taking on more complex topics as you construct a full Wordpress website stack consisting of a database, web servers, and load balancer. This book will prompt you to think about how these fit together and will explain what to do to ensure maintainability long into the future.

Don’t just use Ansible. Completely change how you go about provisioning, configuring, and managing servers, applications, and their dependencies with this powerful, open source automation tool. In exchange for this power and efficiency, Ansible demands a very different way of thinking about resources and how they all fit together. This can be hard to get your head around if you’ve never done it before. Every step of the way, Beginning Ansible Concepts and Application show you best practices so that you can confidently start using Ansible right away.

What You'll Learn

• Set up an Ansible environment
• Create and run playbooks
• Organize groups of variables, vaults, roles, and tasks to ensure your playbooks are scalable
• Protect secrets using Ansible Vaults
• Automate the build of a Wordpress website

Who This Book Is For

Developers looking for a better way to manage their servers other than by logging in and typing commands. Also enthusiasts who want to learn not just how to use Ansible but how to use it correctly and confidently.

Foundations of Ansibl

Create an environment 

Challenges to come

Introduce Ansible 

History 

Tools 

Download and set up Ansible

Using virtual python environments 

Using VirtualBox

Play with Ansible

Revision control and security aspects

Python 2 vs 3

Create and run your first playbook

Structure of a playbook

Put servers under source control

Using localhost 

Inventories 

Setting up real servers

Playbook skills and inventory skills

Core modules

Installing packages, copying config files, and making changes to system config

Web based documentation

Using fact gathering

Automatic (implicit) fact-gathering for every playbook

Explicit fact gathering

Stat to gain information on files, directories, and symbolic links

Conditionals 

Options 

includes and when clauses

Loops 

Syntax 

Basic directory structure 

Organize groups of variables, vaults, roles, and tasks to ensure your playbooks are scalable

Ansible-vaults

Environment specific encrypted stores

Creation of custom modules

Module types (actions, filters, callback to name a few)

Hints and tips on when a plugin is the right course of action

Inventory, or CMDB

Inventory source 

Simple web service to pull in the ansible inventory at runtime

Meta groups 

Share playbooks with like-minded sysadmins

Ansible Galaxy