Ansible for Real-Life Automation: A complete Ansible handbook filled with practical IT automation use cases
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Author
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Packt Publishing
Get ready to leverage the power of Ansible's wide applicability to automate and manage IT infrastructure with Ansible for Real-Life Automation. This book will guide you in setting up and managing the free and open source automation tool and remote-managed nodes in the production and dev/staging environments.
Starting with its installation and deployment, you'll learn automation using simple use cases in your workplace. You'll go beyond just Linux machines to use Ansible to automate Microsoft Windows machines, network devices, and private and public cloud platforms such as VMWare, AWS, and GCP. As you progress through the chapters, you'll integrate Ansible into your DevOps workflow and deal with application container management and container platforms such as Kubernetes. This Ansible book also contains a detailed introduction to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to help you get up to speed with Red Hat AAP and integration with CI/CD and ITSM.
What's more, you'll implement efficient automation solutions while learning best practices and methods to secure sensitive data using Ansible Vault and alternatives to automate non-supported platforms and operations using raw commands, command modules, and REST API calls.
By the end of this book, you'll be proficient in identifying and developing real-life automation use cases using Ansible.
Review
"One of my best reads on #Ansible so far!
It's been a while that I've been looking for a really good read on Ansible fortunately, I found this book: Ansible for Real-Life Automation!
Automation is a big part of my job writing scripts, using Terraform and I'm quite happy with that. The problem was I'm not so hands-on with Ansible, and I really wanted to overcome this technical debt.
But now, after reading this book, I'm much more familiar with the hands-on part of Ansible and and no longer frightened to use it.
The technical books that I like are those that guide you with baby steps at the very beginning and then gradually move toward more complex situations and use cases, and that is the case with this book.
The chapters I appreciated the most were those regarding automation in cloud/DevOps/container-based environments (chapters 7, 9, and 10).
Another one of the chapters I loved was the one that walks through secret management for cloud-native environments, which I use heavily on one of my current projects.
I loved this book. I recommend it to anyone who does automation in their day-to-day jobs!"
--Alain Airom, Cloud Engineer, IBM for the book Ansible for Real-Life Automation
About the Author
Gineesh Madapparambath has over 15 years of experience in IT service management and consultancy with experience in planning, deploying, and supporting Linux-based projects.
He has designed, developed, and deployed automation solutions based on Ansible and Ansible Automation Platform (formerly Ansible Tower) for bare metal and virtual server building, patching, container management, network operations, and custom monitoring. Gineesh has coordinated, designed, and deployed servers in data centers globally and has cross-cultural experience in classic, private cloud (OpenStack and VM ware), and public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform).
Gineesh has handled multiple roles such as systems engineer, automation specialist, infrastructure designer, and content author. His primary focus is on IT and application automation using Ansible, containerization using OpenShift (and Kubernetes), and infrastructure automation using Terraform.
- Explore real-life IT automation use cases and employ Ansible for automation
- Develop playbooks with best practices for production environments
- Approach different automation use cases with the most suitable methods
- Use Ansible for infrastructure management and automate VMWare, AWS, and GCP
- Integrate Ansible with Terraform, Jenkins, OpenShift, and Kubernetes
- Manage container platforms such as Kubernetes and OpenShift with Ansible
- Get to know the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and its capabilities
This book is for DevOps and systems engineers looking to adopt Ansible as their automation tool. To get started with this book, basic knowledge of Linux is necessary, along with an understanding of how tasks are done the manual way before setting out to automate them.
- Ansible Automation Introduction
- Starting with Simple Automation
- Automating Your Daily Jobs
- Exploring Collaboration in Automation Development
- Expanding Your Automation Landscape
- Automating Microsoft Windows and Network Devices
- Managing Your Virtualization and Cloud Platforms
- Helping the Database Team with Automation
- Implementing Automation in DevOps workflow
- Managing Containers using Ansible
- Managing Kubernetes using Ansible
- Integrating Ansible with your Tools
- Using Ansible for Secret Management
- Keeping Automation Simple but Powerful
- How to Automate nonsupported platforms
- Automation Best Practices for Production
