Ansible: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

Preface to the Second Edition

In the time since the first edition of the book was written (back in 2014), there have been big changes in the world of Ansible. The Ansible project completed a major release, hitting 2.0. Big changes happened outside the project as well: Ansible, Inc., the company that backs the Ansible project, was acquired by Red Hat. Red Hat’s acquisition hasn’t slowed the Ansible project at all: it’s still in active development and gaining users.

We’ve made multiple changes in this edition. The most significant change is the addition of five new chapters. The book now covers callback plugins, Windows hosts, network hardware, and Ansible Tower. We added so much content to the “Complex Playbooks” chapter that we expanded to a second chapter called “Customizing Hosts, Runs and Handlers.” We also rewrote the “Docker” chapter to cover the new Docker modules.

We’ve updated all of the example code for compatibility with Ansible 2.3. In particular, the deprecated sudo clause has been replaced everywhere with become. We also removed references to deprecated modules such as docker, ec2_vpc, and ec2_ami_search and replaced them with examples that use newer modules. The “Vagrant” chapter now covers the Ansible local provisioner, the “Amazon EC2” chapter now covers the Packer Ansible remote provisioner, the “Making Ansible Go Even Faster” chapter now covers asynchronous tasks, and the “Debugging Ansible Playbooks” chapter now covers the debugger that was introduced in version ...