Ansible

Ansible stands out among configuration management tools for being lightweight, for requiring no software to be installed on the machines it manages, and for being quick to pick up. This hands-on guide is aimed at developers who ship code to production servers and at system administrators searching for a more effective way to automate their work. It gets readers working with the tool fast, and it makes the case that Ansible offers both the capabilities and the straightforward design that many teams want.

The book explains how to write playbooks, which are Ansible's scripts for configuration management, and how to control remote servers with them. A large share of the content focuses on the built-in declarative modules, which are presented as the tool's main strength. Readers learn how Ansible differs from other configuration management systems, how to write playbooks in YAML, and how to use variables and facts. A full example walks through deploying a substantial application, and roles are introduced as a way to organize and reuse playbook code.

Later chapters cover techniques for speeding up playbook runs, including SSH multiplexing, pipelining, and parallel execution. The book also shows how to deploy applications to Amazon EC2 and other cloud platforms, and how to use Ansible to build Docker images and launch Docker containers.