Chapter 1, The System Architecture and Design of Ansible, looks at the ins and outs of how Ansible goes about performing tasks on behalf of an engineer, how it is designed, and how to work with inventory and variables.
Chapter 2, Migrating from Earlier Ansible Versions, explains the architectural changes you will experience when you migrate from Ansible 2.x to any version from 3.x onward, how to work with Ansible collections, and also how to build your own—essential reading for anyone familiar with earlier Ansible versions.
Chapter 3, Protecting Your Secrets with Ansible, explores the tools available to encrypt data at rest and prevent secrets from being revealed at runtime.
Chapter 4, Ansible and Windows – Not Just for Linux, explores the integration of Ansible with Windows hosts to enable automation in cross-platform environments.
Chapter 5, Infrastructure Management for Enterprises with AWX, provides an overview of the powerful, open source graphical management framework for Ansible known as AWX, and how this might be employed in an enterprise environment.
Chapter 6, Unlocking the Power of Jinja2 Templates, states the varied uses of the Jinja2 templating engine within Ansible and discusses ways to make the most of its capabilities.
Chapter 7, Controlling Task Conditions, explains how to change the default behavior of Ansible to customize task error and change conditions.
Chapter 8, Composing Reusable Ansible Content with Roles, explains how to move beyond executing loosely organized tasks on hosts, and instead build clean, reusable, and self-contained code structures known as roles to achieve the same end result.
Chapter 9, Troubleshooting Ansible, takes you through the various methods that can be employed to examine, introspect, modify, and debug the operations of Ansible.
Chapter 10, Extending Ansible, covers the various ways in which new capabilities can be added to Ansible via modules, plugins, and inventory sources.
Chapter 11, Minimizing Downtime with Rolling Deployments, explains the common deployment and upgrade strategies to showcase the relevant Ansible features.
Chapter 12, Infrastructure Provisioning, examines cloud infrastructure providers and container systems for creating an infrastructure to manage.
Chapter 13, Network Automation, describes the advancements in the automation of network device configuration using Ansible.
