Linux Bible, 10th Edition

CHAPTER 29Automating Apps and Infrastructure with Ansible

 

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding Ansible
• Installing Ansible
• Stepping through a deployment
• Running ad-hoc commands

To this point in the book, we have mostly focused on manually configuring individual Linux systems. You have learned how to install software, edit configuration files, and start services directly on the machines where they run. While knowing how to work on individual Linux hosts is foundational to managing Linux systems, by itself it doesn't scale well. That's where Ansible comes in.

Ansible changes the mindset of Linux administration from a focus on single systems to groups of systems. It moves configuration of those nodes from each individual machine to a control node. It replaces the user interface of a shell on each machine with Ansible playbooks that run tasks on other machines over a network.

Although our focus here is on managing Linux systems, Ansible can manage many things around those Linux systems as well. There are Ansible modules for making sure that machines are powered on, that network devices are properly configured, and that remote storage is accessible

In all but the smallest data centers, knowing how to deploy and manage Linux systems and surrounding infrastructure automatically is becoming a requirement for many IT jobs these days. For fully containerized data centers, Kubernetes-based application platforms such as OpenShift are becoming the industry standard for container orchestration ...