Ansible: Up and Running, 3rd Edition

Preface to the Third Edition

Since the second edition of this book was published in 2017, there have been tremendous changes in the world of Ansible and Python, including several major releases. Substantial changes happened outside the project as well: for example, Red Hat, the company that backs the Ansible project, was bought by IBM. That hasn’t slowed the Ansible project at all, of course: it’s still in active development and gaining users. The development of cloud infrastructure and containers has also changed the landscape immensely.

We’ve made multiple changes in this edition, most significantly adding six new chapters that cover containers, Molecule, Ansible collections, creating images, cloud infrastructure, and CI/CD. We’ve also added much more detail to other chapters, with a focus on using software engineering best practices and test frameworks to validate code and eradicate guesswork. We’ve updated all the example code for compatibility with the latest Ansible, as well as everything that addresses Python dependencies. Our material was written to reflect the significant changes between 2017 and 2022. We could go on, but we hope you’ll dive into the text, try the code, and discover for yourself just how much Ansible continues to advance.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant width

Used for program listings, as well as ...