Ansible Playbook Essentials

Book excerpt: Design automation blueprints using Ansible's playbooks to orchestrate and manage your multi-tier infrastructure About This Book 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 A step-by-step approach to automating and managing system and application configurations effectively using Ansible's playbooks Who This Book Is For If you are a systems or automation engineer who intends to automate common infrastructure tasks, deploy applications, and use orchestration to configure systems in a co-ordinated manner, then this book is for you. Some understanding of the Linux/UNIX command line interface is expected. 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 application development workflow Orchestrate infrastructure and deploy applications in a coordinated manner In Detail Ansible combines configuration management, orchestration, and parallel command execution into a single tool. Its batteries-included approach and built-in module library makes it easy to integrate it with cloud platforms, databases, and notification services without requiring additional plugins. Playbooks in Ansible define the policies your systems under management enforce. They facilitate effective configuration management rather than running ad hoc scripts to deploy complex applications. This book will show you how to write a blueprint of your infrastructure encompassing multi-tier applications using Ansible's playbooks. Beginning with the basic concepts such as plays, tasks, handlers, inventory, and the YAML syntax that Ansible uses, you will see how to organize your code into a modular structure. Building on this, you will master techniques to create data-driven playbooks with variables, templates, logical constructs, and encrypted data. This book will also take you through advanced clustering concepts such as discovering topology information, managing multiple environments, and orchestration. By the end of this book, you will be able to design solutions to your automation and orchestration problems using playbooks quickly and efficiently. Style and approach This book follows a step-by-step approach, with the concepts explained in a conversational and easy-to-follow style. Each topic is explained sequentially in the process of creating a course. A comprehensive explanation of the basic and advanced features of Ansible playbooks is also included.