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

by Lorin Hochstein

Among the many configuration management tools available, Ansible has some distinct advantages--it's minimal in nature, you don't need to install anything on your nodes, and it has an easy learning curve. This practical guide shows you how to be productive with this tool quickly, whether you're a developer deploying code to production or a system administrator looking for a better automation solution.

Author Lorin Hochstein shows 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 discover that Ansible has the functionality you need and the simplicity you desire.


Understand how Ansible differs from other configuration management systems
Use the YAML file format to write your own playbooks
Learn Ansible's support for variables and facts

Work with a complete example to deploy a non-trivial application
Use roles to simplify and reuse playbooks
Make playbooks run faster with ssh multiplexing, pipelining, and parallelism
Deploy applications to Amazon EC2 and other cloud platforms
Use Ansible to create Docker images and deploy Docker containers

Genres: Programming, Technology, Computer Science, Nonfiction, Technical, Reference, Software

334 pages, Paperback

First published December 8, 2014

Reviews

[Hesam]

یکی از جذابیت‌های همیشگی دنیای کامپیوترها برام ماشینی‌کردن و آتُمیت‌کردن فرآیندها بوده
در برنامه‌نویسی همین لذت را تجربه می‌کنی اما انگار کن کل یک سناریوی کامل از صفر تا صد را یکجا بنویسی و اجرا کنی
نکته‌ی جالب کتاب‌های فنی (طبعا تجربه‌ی من در برق و کامپیوتر هست) اینه که خالی از حکمت‌های زیسته زندگی نیستند
جایی از کتاب اشاره‌ای به سخنی از آلن کِی، دانشمند علوم کامپیوتر برنده جایزه‌ی تورینگ و از پیشگامان برنامه‌نویسی شیءگرا دارد که بسیار قابل تامل است:

simple things should be simple
complex things should be possible

[Sebastian Gebski]

4-4.5 stars :)

I had a short list of issues with this book & I remember that these were not really trivial ones, but ... I've lost it :) So all I do remember now is purely positive:

* proper introduction to Ansible: CHECK!
* practical examples: CHECK!
* application in cloud scenarios: CHECK!
* well shaped code samples: CHECK!
* some 'beyond the basics' scenarios: CHECK!
* Ansible + containers: CHECK!
* day-to-day work (ops) with Ansible: CHECK!

Sometimes it was a bit dry, some topics were not interesting at all (Tower ...), but it's a decent start. If you decide to rely on web tutorials only it'd not be a big loss, but this book surely can't be called a waste of time & money.

[D]

Ansible is deceptively simple. In a few hours, you can have the main idea and be writing playbooks. There are a number of nuances though that will make your life much easier. Do yourself a favor and read this book.

[John Alan]

Superb - The Ansible bible

Ansible up and running is a really super addition to the O’Reilly up and running series.

Starting with the basics Lorin takes his readers through the little and large of Ansible.

The book starts with the very basics and builds all the way, you’ll see how to scale your ansible deployments in terms of both complexity and capacity.

Topics include:

The basics, complex play books, scaling using Roles, multiple hosts etc

Writing custom modules - nice to know how

Intengration with - Vagrant, Amazon Web Service, Docker

Debugging

Ansible is a lot of fun to use, it’s simple but powerful and Ansible up and Running provides the perfect text to let you learn and enjoy Ansible.

Pros:

I really like the idea of a common deployment theme (mezzanine) which runs throughout the book.

Nice appedix on SSH - very welcome since ansible uses this under the hood.

Cons:

Some of the examples I tried didn’t work out of the box. Be sure you define versions when you install things via pip (Lorin actually shows you how in chapter 6)

I can see this book becoming the Ansible bible - if some one writes an Ansible cookbook to stand besides it we’re all home and dry.

So would I recomend the book: Without doubt, no matter what your level of ansible use I can bet you’ll gain from reading through this. If you’re a beginner, just like me, it’s absoluetely SUPER

I’m a big fan of the O’Reilly up and running series and can only hope they continue to produce such informative and fun books (please give us more).

[Goiter]

what i find really frustrating about this book is that it almost requires that you also learn and mess around with Vagrant in parallel. if you're not using Vagrant already (i'm not, because i have no need for such a thing) you wind up needing to interrupt the actual Ansible content and pick apart the Vagrant-specific instructions so that you can then apply it to whatever you *are* using... be it VirtualBox, Azure, Proxmox, EC2, etc. it really breaks up the flow for me.

naturally, Ansible's primary function for most people will be interacting with numerous discrete machines -- be they physical, virtual, containers, or whtever -- and thus the reader will need SOME method by which to create/modify these machines, some lab environment. but insisting on Vagrant is annoying. the string `ansible` appears on 402 pages, including the title, TOC, index, and so forth. the string `vagrant` is present on 114 pages. i am here to learn Ansible, not Vagrant. i shouldn't be seeing things like, "It helps to know that a Vagrant 2 file is executed by a Ruby interpreter" in an Ansible book.

also, i've found a few spots where the book contradicts itself... namely, when it's trying to describe how you should have a working directory set up. in some exercises, it will tell you to create a file in a directory that doesn't exist. at the beginning of Chapter 3, it explicitly says "at the end of the chapter you should have a directory tree that looks like the following" and just two pages later the book begins referencing nonexistent subdirectories. then, ten pages after that, the book throws another curveball at you and implies you should be working in some structure like `ansiblebook/ch03/playbooks`. nowhere else is such a structure mentioned! now i'm wondering if i've got my files in the right place. things like this really get me frustrated because i feel like i have to wind up trying to troubleshoot the inaccurate/unclear setup rather than just learning the subject at hand.

it's also the sort of book that just suddenly says something, like "The play in our playbook has a new section called vars:". it does? when did that happen? you didn't tell me to type that, so how does it have this new section in it? you also aren't explaining what each of the parameters/arguments mean, and why you want me setting them to the values in the example.

overall, i do not like this book. judging by reviews, my gripe is not one that most other readers share... and that's fine. maybe it's just me. i think the authors/editors could really do a better job at generalizing the prerequisite foundational information, in such a way that Ansible remains the primary focus. i wish No Starch Press wrote an Ansible book, because their writers/editors are way more clear.

[Karol Szczepański]

This book describes a lot of ansible features without focusing too much on a single one of them. It might be a little outdated in some parts some bit ly links do not point to the correct place any more, but it lays out the concepts of ansible just fine. I'd prefer if the author described ansible vault a little more though, because it seems like an important ansible component and the book left me thinking about what scenarios it could be utilized in.

[Shane Sexton]

This is an excellent guide to using Ansible that I find myself frequently referring back to. While the online Ansible documentation is very helpful for working with individual modules, it can be harder to "put it all together." That's where Ansible Up & Running comes in.

[Kerszi]

Książka o dużym potencjale. Dużo przykładów, również dla początkujących z Ansible. Niemniej trzeba znać podstawy Linuxa. Chociaż Ansible jest też na Windowsa. Na pewno do niej wrócę, jeżeli będę chciał coś sprawdzić.

[Phúc Võ]

A good introduction for why using Ansible, and providing a good example of using Ansible with Vagrant, Docker, ... (things that an operator engineer would touch)

[Arsenii Yamnii]

Very good. But may be little shorter)))

[Andrés J. Fry]

A little outdated, but is a really good book for learning Ansible.

[yacoob]

Very good, no-nonsense Ansible introduction. I'd probably rearrange the sections a bit - the debugging chapter tucked at the very end would be more useful to me with my hands-on approach if it'd appear somewhere past the initial concepts. I could probably also shave some of the additional explanations ("here's how to make script executable") - at few points they seemed really out of place, and unnecessary. This way or the other, it was a very informative book. Recommended to anyone who's considering using Ansible.

[Rrrrrron]

Great intro. Concise and to the point for someone who knows little about dev ops beyond basic scipting and setting up his own development environments on a unix/linux machine (mostly, python/flask, node, react/flux/webpack). Stopped after page 80-ish as we moved back to Heroku from Digitial Ocean as we realized that there was just too much to do for a 2 person startup at this point.

[Mark]

This is not your typical O'Reilly guide to a language. Written idiosyncratically, and not presenting simple recipes to get you started with Ansible, it is perhaps, as the title suggests, better for one who is already 'Up and Running' with Ansible, or, at least, complements this book with extensive reading of the online documentation.

[Yamir Encarnacion]

This books covers all the basics well

This book is meant to be read from start to finish and in written in a tutorial style.

As a side note, I found Ansible to be easier to understand than Chef which I had already spent some time studying.

[Derek]

It will get you started with ansible pretty quickly, but after the first half of the book, you're probably going to switch back to the documentation unless you specifically need to use vagrant or docker.

[Jaroslav]

Nice overview of the tool we're using at our company. Great chapters about using Ansible with AWS and Docker. I also learned about several arcane features of SSH. Some examples are too big and tedious for a book, I had to skim through them.

[Ernestas Poskus]

To the point

[Luca]

Very good introduction. I liked the fact the author chose to deploy an app as a main drive of the examples

[Chris King]

A very concise introduction to Ansible.

[Jarkko Tervonen]

300 pages of Ansible configuration files. Interesting...

[Dmitry]

good enough

[William Högman]

Clear and concise overview of ansible

[Gregthory LeBaron]

Best book on Ansible.