To get the most out of this book

In this book, I will first guide you through the installation and deployment of the Ansible automation tool, and later, I will explain some real IT use cases and methods to use Ansible for automating such operations. Since the focus of the book is on different automation use cases, some of the chapters might have additional technical requirements, such as basic knowledge of a specific technology or access to a lab environment (such as a Kubernetes cluster). For this, I have also covered the methods to arrange the development environment if you want to practice. Always refer to the Ansible documentation at https://docs.ansible.com and other provided links in the chapters for further learning.

For testing and development, you can get no-cost RHEL (https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-enterprise-linux) subscriptions. It is also possible to replace RHEL8 with other operating systems, such as Fedora, CentOS, or Ubuntu, but you might need to adjust some of the commands and modules in the playbook.

If you are reading a soft copy or digital version of this book, it is advised to type the commands and develop the playbooks by yourself rather than copy-pasting from the book. However, you can access the code, snippets, and playbooks from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section) for reference.