Ansible Quick Start Guide

Configure Ansible and start coding YAML playbooks using the appropriate modules

Key Features

• Create and use Ansible Playbook to script and organise management tasks
• Benefit from the Ansible community roles and modules to resolve complex and niche tasks
• Write configuration management code to automate infrastructure

Book Description

Configuration Management (CM) tools help administrators reduce their workload. Ansible is one of the best Configuration Management tools, and can act as an orchestrator for managing other CMs. This book is the easiest way to learn how to use Ansible as an orchestrator and a Configuration Management tool. With this book, you will learn how to control and monitor computer and network infrastructures of any size,physical or virtual.

You will begin by learning about the Ansible client-server architecture. To get started, you will set up and configure an Ansible server. You will then go through the major features of Ansible: Playbook and Inventory. Then, we will look at Ansible systems and network modules.

You will then use Ansible to enable infrastructure automated configuration management, followed by best practices for using Ansible roles and community modules.

Finally, you will explore Ansible features such as Ansible Vault, Ansible Containers, and Ansible plugins.

What you will learn

• Implement Playbook YAML scripts and its capacities to simplify day-to-day tasks
• Setup Static and Dynamic Inventory
• Use Ansible predefined modules for Linux, Windows, networking, and virtualisation administration
• Organize and configure the host filesystem using storage and files modules
• Implement Ansible to enable infrastructure automated configuration management
• Simplify infrastructure administration
• Search and install new roles and enable them within Ansible
• Secure your data using Ansible Vault

Who this book is for

This book is targeted at System Administrators and Network Administrators who want to use Ansible to automate an infrastructure. No knowledge of Ansible is required.

Table of Contents

1. What is Ansible?
2. Ansible Setup and Configuration
3. Ansible Inventory and Playbook
4. Ansible Modules
5. Ansible Automated Infrastructure
6. Ansible Coding for Configuration Management
7. Ansible Galaxy and Community Roles
8. Ansible Advanced Features

Mohamed Alibi is a Linux system administrator who works at the European Bioinformatics Institute, EMBL-EBI. His area of specialization is mass virtual machine and container provisioning and infrastructure administration for medium-sized distributed bioinformatics training facilities. He always keeps abreast of the latest innovations and developments in new technologies to solve his daily challenges. He holds an MSc in Networking and Computer Sciences in a collaborative program with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the IPT of Tunis, where he expanded his expertise in grid computing data management between the NCSA and IGB under the NIH project H3ABioNet. He published his first book in 2015 with Packt, called Mastering CentOS 7 Linux Server.