Hall - Ansible configuration management: leverage the power of Ansible to manage your infrastructure efficiently

Daniel Hall started as a systems administrator at RMIT University after completing his bachelor's in computer science in 2009. After spending 5 years improving deployment processes at realestate.com.au, he became the sole Systems Engineer at Melbourne lighting startup LIFX. Like many system administrators, he is constantly trying to make his job easier, and has been using Ansible to this effect. Daniel also wrote the first edition of this book.

I would like to thank my partner, Eliza, for her continued support while writing this book. I would also like to thank my reviewers for their insightful corrections. Finally, I would like to thank everybody at Packt for giving me this opportunity to follow up on the first edition of my book.

Maykel Moya has been working in Systems and Network Administration since 1999. Previously, he was at two of the largest ISPs in his hometown of Cuba, where he managed HA clusters, SAN, AAA systems, WAN, and Cisco routers. He entered the GNU/Linux landscape through RedHat, but today his main experience lies in Debian/Ubuntu systems. He identifies with the Free Software philosophy.

Convinced through personal experience that human intervention in computer operations doesn't scale and is error-prone, he is constantly seeking ways to let software offload the tedious and repetitive tasks from people. With a background in Puppet, he looked for alternatives and discovered Ansible in its early days. Since then he has been contributing to it.

He is currently employed by ShuttleCloud Corp., a company specialized in cloud data migration at scale. Here, he works as a Site Reliability Engineer, ensuring that the machine fleet is always available, runs reliably, and manages resources in an optimal manner. Ansible is one of the many technologies he uses to accomplish this on a daily basis.

Fernando F. Rodrigues is an IT professional with more than 10 years of experience in systems administration, especially with Linux and VMware. As a system administrator, he has always focused on programming and has experience in working on projects from the government sector to financial institutions. He is a technology enthusiast, and his areas of interest include cloud computing, virtualization, infrastructure automation, and Linux administration.

He is also the technical reviewer of the books VMware ESXi Cookbook and Learning Ansible , both by Packt Publishing.

Patrik Uytterhoeven has over 16 years of experience in IT. Most of this time was spent on HP Unix and Red Hat Linux. In late 2012, he joined Open-Future, a leading open source integrator and the first Zabbix reseller and training partner in Belgium.

When Patrik joined Open-Future, he gained the opportunity to certify himself as a Zabbix-certified trainer. Since then, he has provided training and public demonstrations not only in Belgium but also around the world, in countries such as the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, and Ireland.

Because Patrik also has a deep interest in configuration management, he wrote some Ansible roles for Red Hat 6.x and 7.x to deploy and update Zabbix. These roles, and some others, can be found in the Ansible Galaxy at https://galaxy.ansible.com/list#/users/1375.

Patrik is also a technical reviewer of Learning Ansible and the author of the Zabbix cookbook. Both the books are published by Packt Publishing.

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Preface

Since CFEngine was first created by Mark Burgess in 1993, configuration management tools have been constantly evolving. Followed by the emergence of more modern tools such as Puppet and Chef, there are now a large number of choices available to a system administrator.

Ansible is one of the newer tools to arrive into the configuration management space. Where other tools have focused on completeness and configurability, Ansible has bucked the trend and, instead, focused on simplicity and ease of use.

In this book, we aim to show you how to use Ansible from the humble beginnings of its CLI tool, to writing playbooks, and then managing large and complex environments. Finally, we teach you how to build your own modules and extend Ansible by writing plugins that add new features.