Ansible: From Beginner to Pro

by Michael Heap

This book is your concise guide to Ansible, the simple way to automate apps and IT infrastructure. In less than 250 pages, this book takes you from knowing nothing about configuration management to understanding how to use Ansible in a professional setting. You will learn how to create an Ansible playbook to automatically set up an environment, ready to install an open source project. You’ll extract common tasks into roles that you can reuse across all your projects, and build your infrastructure on top of existing open source roles and modules that are available for you to use. You will learn to build your own modules to perform actions specific to your business. By the end you will create an entire cluster of virtualized machines, all of which have your applications and all their dependencies installed automatically. Finally, you'll test your Ansible playbooks. Ansible can do as much or as little as you want it to. From Beginner to Pro will teach you the key skills you need to be an Ansible professional. You’ll be writing roles and modules and creating entire environments without human intervention in no time at all – add it to your library today. What You Will Learn
Who This Book Is For
D evelopers that currently create development and production environments by hand. If you find yourself running apt-get install regularly, this book is for you. Ansible adds reproducibility and saves you time all at once. From Beginner to Pro is great for any developer wanting to enhance their skillset and learn new tools.

Genres: Computer Science, Nonfiction

187 pages, Paperback

Published September 27, 2016

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book to get up and running with Ansible. Wish I had this book when I first started working with it.

[Julio Biason · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's kinda hard to put a review on this. I mean, yes, it takes you from the basics of Ansible, explaining how to build a playbook, split things into roles, adding triggers... the normal Ansible stuff.

The problem lies on the Python part. Ansible is built on top of Python and the book mentions the current version of Python: 2.6. Problem is, Python 2.6 was released in 2008 and the 2.x series in unsupported at this point. Surely, it's a matter of time for this kind of stuff to happen, but still...

Also, it seems the author didn't really know Python. The last part, when talking about building your own Ansible module, it uses the long version to build dictionaries, dict(key=value), instead of the classic and short {'key': value}. There is no explanation why use this version instead.

Sure, at this point, it helps beginners with Ansible, but I'm not quite sure if the "Pro" part still holds up.

[Az Vera · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clear and concise introduction to Ansible that follows a logical progression of steps. The author includes all the information you need to get up and running with Ansible, both as a provisioning and an orchestration tool. In both avenues, Michael Heap starts you out with simple tasks, from checking you can ping a machine or spinning up an EC2 instance to installing a fully customised Wordpress instance or rolling out a fleet of EC2 machines in a AWS VPC.

Very impressed with this, a great guide for anyone starting out with Ansible.

[Marcin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book to start with Ansible.