Ansible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server--or thousands.

Ansible is a general purpose IT automation platform, and it can be used for a variety of purposes. From configuration management: enforcing declared state across your infrastructure, to procedural application deployment, to broad multi-component and multi-system orchestration of complicated interconnected systems. It is agentless, so it can coexist with legacy tools, and it's easy to install, configure, and maintain.

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

Leverage the power of Ansible 2 and related tools and scale DevOps processes About This Book Learn how to use Ansible playbooks along with YAML and JINJA to create efficient DevOps solutions Use Ansible to provision and automate Docker containers and images Learn the fundamentals of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and how to leverage Ansible to implement these modern DevOps Learn the fundamentals of creating custom Ansible modules Learn the fundamentals of Ansible Galaxy Follow along step-by-step as we teach you to scale Ansible for your DevOps processes Who This Book Is For If you are a DevOps engineer, administrator, or developer and want to implement the DevOps environment in your organization using Ansible, then this book is for you. What You Will Learn Get to the grips with the fundamentals of Ansible 2.2 and how you can benefit from leveraging Ansible for DevOps. Adapt the DevOps process and learn how Ansible and other tools can be used to automate it. Start automating Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery tasks using Ansible Maximize the advantages of tools such as Docker, Jenkins, JIRA, and many more to implement the DevOps culture. Integrate DevOps tools with Ansible Extend Ansible using Python and create custom modules that integrate with unique specific technology stacks Connect and control the states of various third-party applications such as GIT, SVN, Artifactory, Nexus, Jira, Hipchat, Slack, Nginx, and others In Detail Thinking about adapting the DevOps culture for your organization using a very simple, yet powerful automation tool, Ansible 2? Then this book is for you! In this book, you will start with the role of Ansible in the DevOps module, which covers fundamental DevOps practices and how Ansible is leveraged by DevOps organizations to implement consistent and simplified configuration management and deployment. You will then move on to the next module, Ansible with DevOps, where you will understand Ansible fundamentals and how Ansible Playbooks can be used for simple configuration management and deployment tasks. After simpler tasks, you will move on to the third module, Ansible Syntax and Playbook Development, where you will learn advanced configuration management implementations, and use Ansible Vault to secure top-secret information in your organization. In this module, you will also learn about popular DevOps tools and the support that Ansible provides for them (MYSQL, NGINX, APACHE and so on). The last module, Scaling Ansible for the enterprise, is where you will integrate Ansible with CI and CD solutions and provision Docker containers using Ansible. By the end of the book you will have learned to use Ansible to leverage your DevOps tasks. Style and approach A step-by-step guide to automating all DevOps stages with ease using Ansible

Deploy a SharePoint farm in a repeatable, predictable, and reliable fashion using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) techniques to automate provisioning. Savvy IT pros will learn how to use DevOps practices and open source tools to greatly reduce costs, and streamline management operations for SharePoint farms deployed via Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, or on premise. DevOps for SharePoint will help you navigate the complex challenges of deploying and managing SharePoint Server farms. You will learn how to reduce time-consuming tasks and errors when generating development, testing, or production environments. And you will benefit from learning proven methods to apply Microsoft updates with minimal downtime and productivity loss. Whether you are a SharePoint architect, IT pro, or developer helping customers with the SharePoint platform, this book will teach you the most useful DevOps practices to tackle those issues and broaden your skill set. What You’ll Learn Understand the basics of the most popular open source tools—Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, and Ansible—and how to use them in the context of deploying and scaling a SharePoint farm Use Vagrant to build SharePoint development environments in less than an hour, and add automated testing Use Packer to create a “golden image” with preconfigured settings, and then use it as the base image in your Terraform configuration for both AWS and Azure farms Use Terraform to scale your SharePoint farm topology Use Red Hat’s Ansible Playbooks to perform configuration management on your farmUse Terraform to deploy immutable infrastructure environments using IaC (Infrastructure as Code)Use InSpec 2.0 to stay in compliance by testing your cloud infrastructureUse Ansible to apply Microsoft updates and patches Who This Book Is For IT pros and developers who are looking to expand their knowledge and take a modern approach by using open source technologies to work with Microsoft products. Experience installing SharePoint, and a basic understanding of either Azure or AWS, is helpful.

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. Ansible: 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 Learn why Ansible is so popular and how to download and install it Create a playbook that automatically downloads and installs a popular open source project Use open source roles to complete common tasks, and write your own specific to your business Extend Ansible by writing your own modules Test your infrastructure using Test Kitchen and ServerSpec Who This Book Is For Developers 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. Ansible: From Beginner to Pro is great for any developer wanting to enhance their skillset and learn new tools.

Design, develop, and solve real-world automation and orchestration problems by unlocking Ansible's automation capabilities Key FeaturesCompletely revised and updated for Ansible 4.0 and beyondTackle complex automation challenges with the newly added features in AnsibleLearn about the rapidly expanding field of network automation using Ansible, with the help of practical examples for configuring network devicesBook Description Ansible is a modern, YAML-based automation tool (built on top of Python, one of the world's most popular programming languages) with a massive and ever-growing user base. Its popularity and Python underpinnings make it essential learning for all in the DevOps space. This fourth edition of Mastering Ansible provides complete coverage of Ansible automation, from the design and architecture of the tool and basic automation with playbooks to writing and debugging your own Python-based extensions. You'll learn how to build automation workflows with Ansible's extensive built-in library of collections, modules, and plugins. You'll then look at extending the modules and plugins with Python-based code and even build your own collections — ultimately learning how to give back to the Ansible community. By the end of this Ansible book, you'll be confident in all aspects of Ansible automation, from the fundamentals of playbook design to getting under the hood and extending and adapting Ansible to solve new automation challenges. What you will learnGain an in-depth understanding of how Ansible works under the hoodGet to grips with Ansible collections and how they are changing and shaping the future of AnsibleFully automate the Ansible playbook executions with encrypted dataUse blocks to construct failure recovery or cleanupExplore the playbook debugger and Ansible consoleTroubleshoot unexpected behavior effectivelyWork with cloud infrastructure providers and container systemsWho this book is for If you are an Ansible developer or operator who has a detailed understanding of its core elements and applications but are now looking to enhance your skills in applying automation using Ansible, this book is for you. Prior experience working with core system administration tasks on Linux and basic familiarity with concepts such as cloud computing, containers, network devices, and fundamentals of a high-level programming language will help you make the most of this book.

DevOps for the Desperate is a hands-on, no-nonsense guide for those who land in a DevOps environment and need to get up and running quickly. This book introduces fundamental concepts software developers need to know to flourish in a modern DevOps environment including infrastructure as code, configuration management, security, containerization and orchestration, monitoring and alerting, and troubleshooting. Readers will follow along with hands-on examples to learn how to tackle common DevOps tasks. The book begins with an exploration of DevOps concepts using Vagrant and Ansible to build systems with repeatable and predictable states, including configuring a host with user-based security. Next up is a crash course on containerization, orchestration, and delivery using Docker, Kubernetes, and a CI/CDpipeline. The book concludes with a primer in monitoring and alerting with tips for troubleshootingcommon host and application issues. You'll learn how to: Use Ansible to manage users and groups, and enforce complex passwords Create a security policy for administrative permissions, and automate a host-based firewall Get started with Docker to containerize applications, use Kubernetes for orchestration, and deploycode using a CI/CD pipeline Build a monitoring stack, investigate common metric patterns, and trigger alerts Troubleshoot and analyze common issues and errors found on hosts

Design, develop, and solve real world automation and orchestration needs by unlocking the automation capabilities of Ansible About This Book Discover how Ansible works in detail Explore use cases for Ansible's advanced features including task delegation, fast failures, and serial task execution Extend Ansible with custom modules, plugins, and inventory sources Who This Book Is For This book is intended 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 Understand Ansible's code and logic flow Safeguard sensitive data within Ansible Access and manipulate complex variable data within Ansible playbooks Handle task results to manipulate change and failure definitions Organize Ansible content into a simple structure Craft a multi-tier rollout playbook utilizing load balancers and manipulating your monitoring system Utilize advanced Ansible features to orchestrate rolling updates with almost no service disruptions Troubleshoot Ansible failures to understand and resolve issues Extend Ansible with custom modules, plugins, or inventory sources In Detail Automation is critical to success in the world of DevOps. How quickly and efficiently an application deployment can be automated, or a new infrastructure can be built up, can be the difference between a successful product or a failure. Ansible provides a simple yet powerful automation engine. Beyond the basics of Ansible lie a host of advanced features which are available to help you increase efficiency and accomplish complex orchestrations with ease. This book provides you with the knowledge you need to understand how Ansible 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. Style and approach A clear, practical guide that covers best practise, system architecture and design aspects that will help you master Ansible with ease.

Simplify your DevOps roles with DevOps tools and techniques Key FeaturesLearn to utilize business resources effectively to increase productivity and collaborationLeverage the ultimate open source DevOps tools to achieve continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD)Ensure faster time-to-market by reducing overall lead time and deployment downtimeBook Description The implementation of DevOps processes requires the efficient use of various tools, and the choice of these tools is crucial for the sustainability of projects and collaboration between development (Dev) and operations (Ops). This book presents the different patterns and tools that you can use to provision and configure an infrastructure in the cloud. You'll begin by understanding DevOps culture, the application of DevOps in cloud infrastructure, provisioning with Terraform, configuration with Ansible, and image building with Packer. You'll then be taken through source code versioning with Git and the construction of a DevOps CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins, GitLab CI, and Azure Pipelines. This DevOps handbook will also guide you in containerizing and deploying your applications with Docker and Kubernetes. You'll learn how to reduce deployment downtime with blue-green deployment and the feature flags technique, and study DevOps practices for open source projects. Finally, you'll grasp some best practices for reducing the overall application lead time to ensure faster time to market. By the end of this book, you'll have built a solid foundation in DevOps, and developed the skills necessary to enhance a traditional software delivery process using modern software delivery tools and techniques What you will learnBecome well versed with DevOps culture and its practicesUse Terraform and Packer for cloud infrastructure provisioningImplement Ansible for infrastructure configurationUse basic Git commands and understand the Git flow processBuild a DevOps pipeline with Jenkins, Azure Pipelines, and GitLab CIContainerize your applications with Docker and KubernetesCheck application quality with SonarQube and PostmanProtect DevOps processes and applications using DevSecOps toolsWho this book is for If you are a developer or a system administrator interested in understanding continuous integration, continuous delivery, and containerization with DevOps tools and techniques, this book is for you.