Beginning Ansible Concepts and Application

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.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Getting Setup and Running

Chapter 2: Your First Steps with Ansible

Chapter 3: Choosing Your Targets

Chapter 4: Your First Playbook

Chapter 5: Batteries Included: Ansible Modules

Chapter 6: It’s All Variable, That’s a Fact

Chapter 7: Becoming an Ansible Jinja

Chapter 8: Handling Change

Chapter 9: Roles: Ansible’s Packing Cubes

Chapter 10: Building a Load Balancer: Controlling Flow

Chapter 11: Running a Blog

Chapter 12: Locking Away Your Secrets: Vaults

Chapter 13: Worlds of Possibility

About the Authors

Shaun Smith is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS) and holds degrees in Computer Science and Psychology. He has a wealth of experience across a broad range of technology, which he combines in novel ways to build out industry-leading, scalable and highly-secure solutions to complex problems. He evangelises simple, elegant and secure designs and these days is focusing on making the Internet a safer place to be and up-skilling the next generation.

Peter Membrey is a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Chartered IT Professional and a Chartered Engineer with nearly a quarter of a century in the field. He has a doctorate in engineering and a masters degree in IT specialising in Information Security. He’s co-authored over a dozen books, a number of research papers on a variety of topics and has recently been awarded the Distinguished Contributor award by the IEEE Computer Society.