Ansible Playbook Essentials: Design automation blueprints using Ansible's playbooks to orchestrate and manage your multitier infrastructure

Organize and write code with the help of Ansible playbooks and manage and automate your infrastructure seamlessly

Key Features

• Get to grips with Ansible's features such as orchestration, automatic node discovery, and data encryption
• Create data-driven, modular and reusable automation code with Ansible roles, facts, variables, and templates
• Follow a step-by-step approach to automating and managing system and application configurations effectively using Ansible's playbooks

Book Description

Ansible Playbook Essentials will show you how to write a blueprint of your infrastructure, encompassing multitier applications using Ansible's playbooks. Beginning with basic concepts such as plays, tasks, handlers, inventory, and YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML) syntax that Ansible uses, you'll understand how to organize your code into a modular structure. Building on this, you will study techniques to create data-driven playbooks with variables, templates, logical constructs, and encrypted data, which will further strengthen your application skills in Ansible. Adding to this, the book will also take you through advanced clustering concepts, such as discovering topology information about other nodes in the cluster and managing multiple environments with isolated configurations. As you approach the concluding chapters, you can expect to learn about orchestrating infrastructure and deploying applications in a coordinated manner.

By the end of this book, you will be able to design solutions to your automation and orchestration problems using playbooks quickly and efficiently.

What you will learn

• Write simple tasks and plays
• Organize code into a reusable, modular structure
• Separate code from data using variables and Jinja2 templates
• Run custom commands and scripts using Ansible's command modules
• Control execution flow based on conditionals
• Integrate nodes and discover topology information about other nodes in the cluster
• Encrypt data with Ansible Vault
• Create environments with isolated configurations to match the application development workflow
• Orchestrate infrastructure and deploy applications in a coordinated manner

Who this book is for

If you are a systems or an automation engineer who wants to automate common infrastructure tasks, deploy applications, and use orchestration to configure systems in a synchronized manner, this book is ideal for you. Some familiarity with the Linux/Unix command-line interface is necessary.

Table of Contents

1. Blueprinting Your Infrastructure
2. Going Modular with Ansible Roles
3. Separating Code and Data - Variables, Facts, and Templates
4. Bringing In Your Code - Custom Commands and Scripts
5. Controlling Execution Flow - Conditionals
6. Iterative Control Structures - Loops
7. Node Discovery and Clustering
8. Encrypting Data with Vault
9. Managing Environments
10. Orchestrating Infrastructure with Ansible