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Mastering Ansible, 4th Edition - Fourth Edition

You're reading from Mastering Ansible, 4th Edition - Fourth Edition

Product type Book

Published in Dec 2021

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781801818780

Pages 540 pages

Edition 4th Edition

Languages

Concepts

Configuration Management

Authors (2):

James Freeman

Jesse Keating

View More author details

Table of Contents (18) Chapters

Preface

1. Section 1: Ansible Overview and Fundamentals

2. Chapter 1: The System Architecture and Design of Ansible

3. Chapter 2: Migrating from Earlier Ansible Versions

4. Chapter 3: Protecting Your Secrets with Ansible

5. Chapter 4: Ansible and Windows – Not Just for Linux

6. Chapter 5: Infrastructure Management for Enterprises with AWX

7. Section 2: Writing and Troubleshooting Ansible Playbooks

8. Chapter 6: Unlocking the Power of Jinja2 Templates

9. Chapter 7: Controlling Task Conditions

10. Chapter 8: Composing Reusable Ansible Content with Roles

11. Chapter 9: Troubleshooting Ansible

12. Chapter 10: Extending Ansible

13. Section 3: Orchestration with Ansible

14. Chapter 11: Minimizing Downtime with Rolling Deployments

15. Chapter 12: Infrastructure Provisioning

16. Chapter 13: Network Automation

17. Other Books You May Enjoy

Best practices

All the usual best practices of using Ansible apply when automating network devices with it. For example, never store passwords in the clear, and make use of ansible-vault where appropriate. Despite this, network devices are their own special class of devices when it comes to Ansible, and support for them started to flourish from the 2.5 release of Ansible onward. As such, there are a few special best practices that deserve to be mentioned when it comes to network automation with Ansible.

Inventory

Make good use of the inventory structure supported by Ansible when it comes to organizing your network infrastructure and pay particular attention to grouping. Doing so will make your playbook development much easier. For example, suppose you have two switches on your network – one is a Cumulus Linux Switch, as we examined previously, and the other is an Arista EOS-based device. Your inventory may look like this:

[switches:children...

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Authors (2)

James Freeman

James Freeman is an accomplished IT professional with over 25 years' experience in the technology industry. He has more than a decade of first-hand experience in solving real-world enterprise problems in production environments using Ansible, open source, and AWS. As part of this work, he frequently introduces Ansible as a new technology to businesses and CTOs for the first time. In addition, he has co-authored five books and one video training course on Ansible, facilitated bespoke Ansible workshops and training sessions, and presented at both international conferences and meetups on Ansible.

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Jesse Keating

Jesse Keating is an accomplished Ansible user, contributor, and presenter. He has been an active member of the Linux and open source community for over 15 years. He has firsthand experience involving a variety of IT activities, software development, and large-scale system administration. He has presented at numerous conferences and meetups, and has written many articles on a variety of topics.

See other products by Jesse Keating

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