December 2025
Intermediate to advanced
704 pages
19h 14m
English
Content preview from Ubuntu Linux Bible, 11th Edition
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CHAPTER 28Automating Apps and Infrastructure with Ansible
So far in this book, we have mostly focused on manually configuring individual Linux systems. You’ve 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, along with other automation tools like Chef and Terraform, 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 perform many Linux tasks 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. For fully containerized data centers, Kubernetes-based application platforms are becoming the industry standard for container orchestration ...
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