Ansible: Up and Running: Automating Configuration Management and Deployment the Easy Way

Among the many configuration management tools available, Ansible has some distinct advantages: It's minimal in nature. You don't need to install agents on your nodes. And there's an easy learning curve. With this updated third edition, you'll quickly learn how to be productive with Ansible whether you're a developer deploying code or a system administrator looking for a better automation solution.

Authors Bas Meijer, Lorin Hochstein, and Rene Moser show 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 learn how Ansible has all the functionality you need--and the simplicity you desire.

• Explore Ansible configuration management and deployment
• Manage Linux, Windows, and network devices
• Learn how to apply Ansible best practices
• Understand how to use the new collections format
• Create custom modules and plug-ins
• Generate reusable Ansible content for open source middleware
• Build container images, images for cloud instances, and cloud infrastructure
• Automate CI/CD development environments
• Learn how to use Ansible Automation Platform for DevOps

Bas Meijer (he/him) is a freelance software engineer and devops coach. With a major from the University of Amsterdam he has been pioneering web development since the early nineties. He worked in high-frequency trading, banking, cloud security, aviation, and government. Bas has been an Ansible Ambassador since 2014, and was selected too as a Hashicorp Ambassador in 2020.

Lorin Hochstein is a senior software engineer on the Chaos Team at Netflix, where he works on ensuring that Netflix remains available. He is a coauthor of the OpenStack Operations Guide (O'Reilly), as well as numerous academic publications.

René Moser lives in Switzerland with his wife and three kids, likes simple things that work and scale, and earned an Advanced Diploma of Higher Education in IT. He has been engaged in the Open Source community for the past 15 years, most recently working as an ASF CloudStack Committer and as the author of the Ansible CloudStack integration with over 30 CloudStack modules. He became an Ansible Community Core Member in April 2016 and is currently a senior system engineer at SwissTXT.