Mastering Ansible

by Jesse Keating

Master the ins and outs of advanced operations with Ansible About This Book - Learn how to extend Ansible with custom modules, plugins, and inventory sources - Utilize advanced Ansible features to orchestrate rolling updates with little to no service disruptions - An up-to-date book that brings to light the newly added features in Ansible 2.x Who This Book Is For This book is for Ansible developers and operators who have an understanding of the core elements and applications but are now looking to enhance their skills in applying automation using Ansible. What You Will Learn - Gain an in-depth understanding of how Ansible works under the covers - Fully automate the Ansible playbook executions with encrypted data - Access and manipulate variable data within playbooks - Use Blocks to construct failure recovery or cleanup - Explore the Playbook debugger and Ansible Console - Troubleshoot unexpected behavior effectively - Work with cloud infrastructure providers and container systems - Develop custom modules, plugins, and dynamic inventory sources In Detail This book provides you with the knowledge you need to understand how Ansible 2.1 works at a fundamental level and leverage its advanced capabilities. You'll learn how to encrypt Ansible content at rest and decrypt data at runtime. You will master the advanced features and capabilities required to tackle the complex automation challenges of today and beyond. You will gain detailed knowledge of Ansible workflows, explore use cases for advanced features, craft well thought out orchestrations, troubleshoot unexpected behaviour, and extend Ansible through customizations. Finally, you will discover the methods used to examine and debug Ansible operations, helping you to understand and resolve issues. By the end of the book, the readers will be able to unlock the true power of the Ansible automation engine and will tackle complex real world actions with ease. Style and approach This clear, practical guide illustrates the advanced functionalities of Ansible, its system architecture, and design aspects that will help you to master Ansible with ease.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology

236 pages, Paperback

Published November 24, 2015

Reviews

[Eugene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Книжка очень теоретическая, практических примеров там ноль. Вернее, они есть, но для них нужен доступ на сайте издательства. А что делать, если книгу получили на раздаче Humble Bundle?

В остальном, даёт плюс-минус подробное описание, что и как, но уже успела местами заметно устареть. Тем менее, ряд полезных вещей я из неё вынес и закладочки себе поставил.

[Arensb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, a good introduction to Ansible. If you're thinking of using Ansible, or if you've tinkered with it and need to get your head around it, read this.

On the down side, this book desperately needs a copy editor, especially in the last third, to clean up sentences like

However, during an upgrade, it may be desirable to delay all service restarts until every service is ready to minimize interruptions.

The author also has a tendency to use abstract, toy problems to illustrate the concepts he's explaining. For instance, in a section on running tasks only once across a group of hosts, he presents an Ansible playbook that prints "I am groot" once (saving this to the "groot" register), and then, on the last host, prints the value of the "groot" register.
Toy problems are useful because they present a clear, if simplified, view of the problem, without a lot of confounding facts getting in the way. But I find it hard to see how examples like the one above correspond to a real-world installation, or how to build on it to have a task run only once.

[Delhi Irc]

Location: GG6 IRC
Accession No: DL028533

[Domantas Jackūnas · Rating 3 out of 5]

The only thing that it explains well - variable inheritance. Other than that, read it unless you need 101 introduction.