Practical Ansible 2: Automate infrastructure, manage configuration, and deploy applications with Ansible 2.9

Leverage the power of Ansible to gain complete control over your systems and automate application deployment

• Use Ansible 2.9 to automate and control your infrastructure
• Delve into advanced functionality such as plugins and custom modules in Ansible
• Automate and orchestrate major cloud platforms such as OpenStack, AWS, and Azure using Ansible

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.

• Become familiar with the fundamentals of the Ansible framework
• Set up role-based variables and dependencies
• Avoid common mistakes and pitfalls when writing automation code in Ansible
• Extend Ansible by developing your own modules and plugins
• Contribute to the Ansible project by submitting your own code
• Follow best practices for working with cloud environment inventories
• Troubleshoot issues triggered during Ansible playbook runs

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.

1. Getting Started with Ansible
2. Understanding the Fundamentals of Ansible
3. Defining Your Inventory
4. Playbooks and Roles
5. Consuming and Creating Modules
6. Consuming and Creating Plugins
7. Coding Best Practices
8. Advanced Ansible Topics
9. Network Automation with Ansible
10. Container and Cloud Management
11. Troubleshooting and Testing Strategies
12. Getting Started with Ansible Tower