McKendrick - Learn Ansible automate cloud, security, and network infrastructure using Ansible 2.x

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First published: June 2018

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Russ McKendrick is an experienced solution architect who has been working in IT and related industries for over 25 years. During his career, he has had varied responsibilities, from looking after an entire IT infrastructure to providing first-line, second-line, and senior support in both client-facing and internal teams for large organizations.

Russ supports open source systems and tools on public and private clouds at Node4 Limited, where he heads up the public cloud team.

Paul Adamson has worked as an Ops engineer, a developer, a DevOps engineer, and all variations and mixes of all of these. When not reviewing this book, Paul keeps busy helping companies embrace the AWS infrastructure. His language of choice is PHP for all the good reasons and even some of the bad, but mainly habit. While reviewing this book, Paul has been working for Healthy Performance Ltd, helping to apply cutting-edge technology to a cutting-edge approach to well-being.

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Ansible has rapidly grown from a small open source orchestration tool to a full-blown orchestration and configuration management tool owned by Red Hat. In this book, you will learn how to write playbooks using the core Ansible modules to deploy everything from basic LAMP stacks to a full-blown highly available public cloud infrastructure.

By the end of the book, you will have learned how to do the following:

• Written your own playbooks to configure servers running CentOS 7, Ubuntu 17.04, and Windows Server
• Defined a highly available cloud infrastructure in code, making it easy to distribute your infrastructure configuration alongside your own code
• Deployed and configured Ansible Tower and Ansible AWX
• Used community contributed roles and learned how to contribute your own roles
• Worked through several use cases of how you can use Ansible in your day-to-day role and projects

By the end of the book, you should have a good idea of how to integrate Ansible in your day-to-day roles as system administrators, developers, and DevOps practitioners.

This book is perfect for system administrators, developers, and D evOps practitioners who want to take their current workflows and transform them into repeatable playbooks using Ansible. No prior knowledge of Ansible is required.

, An Introduction to Ansible, discusses what problems Ansible has been developed to resolve, who wrote it, and talks about Red Hat's involvement following their acquisition of Ansible.

, Installing and Running Ansible, discusses how we will work through installing Ansible on macOS and Linux, after covering its background. We will also discuss why there is no native Windows installer and cover installing Ansible on the Ubuntu shell in Windows 10 Professional.

, The Ansible Commands, explains how, before moving onto writing and executing more advanced playbooks, we are going to take a look at the Ansible commands. Here, we will cover the usage of the set of commands that make up Ansible.

, Deploying a LAMP Stack, discusses the deployment of a full LAMP stack using the various core modules that ship with Ansible. We will target the CentOS 7 virtual machine running locally.

, Deploying WordPress, explains the use of the LAMP stack, which we deployed in the previous chapter as our base. We will use Ansible to download, install, and configure WordPress.