Introduction

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. With this updated second edition, you’ll learn 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.

Authors and Features

Authors Lorin Hochstein and René Moser show 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.

Key Capabilities

• Manage Windows machines, and automate network device configuration
• Manage your fleet from your web browser with Ansible Tower
• Understand how Ansible differs from other configuration management systems
• Use the YAML file format to write your own playbooks
• Work with a complete example to deploy a non-trivial application
• Deploy applications to Amazon EC2 and other cloud platforms
• Create Docker images and deploy Docker containers with Ansible

Reading Recommendations

This book is best read start to finish, with later chapters building on earlier ones. Because it’s written in a tutorial style, you can follow along on your own machine. Most examples focus on web applications.