Ansible: Up and Running: Automating Configuration Management and Deployment the Easy Way

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