Ansible: Up and Running

by Bas Meijer, Lorin Hochstein, Ren� Moser

Among the many configuration management tools available, Ansible has some distinct It's minimal in nature. You don't need to install agents on your nodes. And there's an easy learning curve. With this updated third edition, you'll quickly learn how to be productive with Ansible whether you're a developer deploying code or a system administrator looking for a better automation solution. Authors Bas Meijer, Lorin Hochstein, and Rene Moser show you how to write playbooks (Ansible's configuration management scripts), manage remote servers, and explore the tool's real built-in declarative modules. You'll learn how Ansible has all the functionality you need--and the simplicity you desire.

Genres: Programming

472 pages, ebook

Published July 12, 2022

Reviews

[thirtytwobirds · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of this is a good introduction to Ansible. I found it pretty easy to follow and a good introduction to the core concepts. You'll definitely need to read other documentation once you try to actually start using it for something, but that's to be expected -- it's an introduction, not a full manual.

The second half of the book devolves into buzzword bingo. But I think the first half of the book is worth the price on its own.

[Mikhail Petrov · Rating 5 out of 5]

The proposal of this book is to explain in simple terms how to work with Ansible for users who do not have expirience with it.
The book's audience: devs, ops, devops, sre, etc.

In summary, after the reading of this book, you may have an understanding of how to do the following
- how to run and deploy ansible playbook
- how to describe your servers for ansible
- how to write your own roles
- how to use handlers and callback plugins
- how to debug your ansible playbooks
- how to test your roles
- and some useful information about Vargant, Docker, Clouds, CI/CD

I'm not an expert in Ansible (but I think I'm an expert in Puppet) and I found this book to be useful for me.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a good, thorough introduction to Ansible. It covers roles, inventories, modules, Ansible Galaxy, templates and even covers Ansible Tower. One criticism I have is I wished the author covered using Ansible in a cloud service more, instead of only devoting one chapter. The vast majority of Ansible users will be utilizing it within a cloud provider, especially if it's for work.