James Freeman - Mastering Ansible. Effectively automate configuration management and deployment challenges with Ansible 2.7

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First published: November 2015
Second edition: March 2017
Third edition: March 2019

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James Freeman is an accomplished IT consultant with over 20 years' experience in the technology industry. He has more than 5 years of first-hand experience of solving real-world enterprise problems in production environments using Ansible, frequently introducing Ansible as a new technology to businesses and CTOs for the first time. In addition, he has authored and facilitated bespoke Ansible workshops and training sessions, and has presented at both international conferences and meetups on Ansible.

Jesse Keating is an accomplished Ansible user, contributor, and presenter. He has been an active member of the Linux and open source community for over 15 years. He has first- hand experience involving a variety of IT activities, software development, and large-scale system administration. He has presented at numerous conferences and meetups, and has written many articles on a variety of topics.

Timothy Rupp has been working in various fields of computing for the last 15 years. He has held positions in cybersecurity and software engineering, as well as in the fields of cloud computing and DevOps.

He was first introduced to Ansible while at Rackspace. As part of the cloud engineering team, he made extensive use of a tool for deploying new capacity to the Rackspace public cloud. Since that introduction, he has contributed patches, provided support for, and presented on Ansible topics at local meetups.

While at F5 Networks, he led the development of F5's Ansible modules and became a core contributor to the Ansible project. Most recently, he has become reinvolved with cybersecurity in the financial sector.

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Welcome to Mastering Ansible, your guide to a collection of the most valuable advanced features and functionalities provided by Ansible, the automation and orchestration tool. This book will provide readers with the knowledge and skills required to truly understand how Ansible functions at a fundamental level. In turn, this will allow readers to master the advanced capabilities needed to tackle the complex automation challenges of today, and the future. Readers will gain knowledge of Ansible workflows, explore use cases for advanced features, troubleshoot unexpected behavior, extend Ansible through customization, and learn about many of the new and important developments in Ansible, especially around infrastructure and network provisioning.

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.

, TheSystem Architecture and Design of Ansible, looks at the ins and outs of how Ansible goes about performing tasks on behalf of an engineer, how it is designed, and how to work with inventory and variables.

, Protecting Your Secrets with Ansible, explores the tools available to encrypt data at rest and prevent secrets from being revealed at runtime.