Mastering Ansible, 3rd Edition

Design, develop, and solve real-world automation and orchestration problems by unlocking the automation capabilities of Ansible.

Key Features
Tackle complex automation challenges with the newly added features in Ansible 2.7
Book Description
Automation is essential for success in the modern world of DevOps. Ansible provides a simple, yet powerful, automation engine for tackling complex automation challenges.

This book will take you on a journey that will help you exploit the latest version's advanced features to help you increase efficiency and accomplish complex orchestrations. This book will help you understand how Ansible 2.7 works at a fundamental level and will also teach you to leverage its advanced capabilities. Throughout this book, you will learn how to encrypt Ansible content at rest and decrypt data at runtime. Next, this book will act as an ideal resource to help you master the advanced features and capabilities required to tackle complex automation challenges. Later, it will walk you through workflows, use cases, orchestrations, troubleshooting, and Ansible extensions. Lastly, you will examine and debug Ansible operations, helping you to understand and resolve issues.

By the end of the book, you will be able to unlock the true power of the Ansible automation engine and tackle complex, real- world actions with ease.

What you will learn
Gain an in-depth understanding of how Ansible works under the hood
Fully automate Ansible playbook executions with encrypted data
Access and manipulate variable data within playbooks
Use blocks to perform failure recovery or cleanup
Explore the Playbook debugger and the Ansible Console
Troubleshoot unexpected behavior effectively
Work with cloud infrastructure providers and container systems
Develop custom modules, plugins, and dynamic inventory sources
Table of Contents
The System Architecture and Design of Ansible
Protecting Your Secrets with Ansible
Ansible and Windows - Not Just for Linux
Infrastructure Management for Enterprises with AWX
Unlocking the Power of Jinja2 Templates
Controlling Task Conditions
Composing Reusable Ansible Content with Roles
Troubleshooting Ansible
Extending Ansible
Minimizing Downtime with Rolling Deployments
Infrastructure Provisioning
Network Automation
Authors
James Freeman

James Freeman is an accomplished IT consultant with over 20 years' experience in the technology industry. He has more than 5 years of first-hand experience of solving realworld enterprise problems in production environments using Ansible, frequently introducing Ansible as a new technology to businesses and CTOs for the first time. In addition, he has authored and facilitated bespoke Ansible workshops and training sessions, and has presented at both international conferences and meetups on Ansible.

Jesse Keating

Jesse Keating is an accomplished Ansible user, contributor, and presenter. He has been an active member of the Linux and open source community for over 15 years. He has firsthand experience involving a variety of IT activities, software development, and large-scale system administration. He has presented at numerous conferences and meetups, and has written many articles on a variety of topics.