Best Ansible Books
Ansible is a universal language, unraveling the mystery of how work gets done. It will turn tough tasks into repeatable playbooks that you can use in your day to day deployments. This guide provides some resources that will help you get an understanding of both technologies which you will leverage to make your performance sweeter and neater.
The biggest upside to Ansible is that it’s fairly easy to get started. The learning curve is smooth and with the right resources you can pick up Ansible without a struggle.
This is an up-to-date list of recommended 15 Ansible Books of 2020.
1.Learn Ansible: Automate cloud, security, and network infrastructure using Ansible 2.x
Author: Russ McKendrick
Publisher: Packt Publishing (June 28, 2018)
Ansible has grown from a small, open source orchestration tool to a full-blown orchestration and configuration management tool owned by Red Hat. Its powerful core modules cover a wide range of infrastructures, including on-premises systems and public clouds, operating systems, devices, and services―meaning it can be used to manage pretty much your entire end-to-end environment. Trends and surveys say that Ansible is the first choice of tool among system administrators as it is so easy to use.
This end-to-end, practical guide will take you on a learning curve from beginner to pro. You'll start by installing and configuring the Ansible to perform various automation tasks. Then, we'll dive deep into the various facets of infrastructure, such as cloud, compute and network infrastructure along with security.
By the end of this book, you'll have an end-to-end understanding of Ansible and how you can apply it to your own environments.
2.Mastering Ansible: Effectively automate configuration management and deployment challenges with Ansible 2.7, 3rd Edition
Author: James Freeman (Author), Jesse Keating (Author)
Publisher: Packt Publishing (March 25, 2019)
This book will take you on a journey that will help you exploit the latest version's advanced features to help you increase efficiency and accomplish complex orchestrations. This book will help you understand how Ansible 2.7 works at a fundamental level and will also teach you to leverage its advanced capabilities. Throughout this book, you will learn how to encrypt Ansible content at rest and decrypt data at runtime. Next, this book will act as an ideal resource to help you master the advanced features and capabilities required to tackle complex automation challenges. Later, it will walk you through workflows, use cases, orchestrations, troubleshooting, and Ansible extensions. Lastly, you will examine and debug Ansible operations, helping you to understand and resolve issues.
By the end of the book, you will be able to unlock the true power of the Ansible automation engine and tackle complex, real- world actions with ease.
3.Ansible: From Beginner to Pro
Author: Michael Heap
Publisher: Apress; 1st ed. edition (September 27, 2016)
This book is your concise guide to Ansible, the simple way to automate apps and IT infrastructure. In less than 250 pages, this book takes you from knowing nothing about configuration management to understanding how to use Ansible in a professional setting.
You will learn how to create an Ansible playbook to automatically set up an environment, ready to install an open source project. You’ll extract common tasks into roles that you can reuse across all your projects, and build your infrastructure on top of existing open source roles and modules that are available for you to use. You will learn to build your own modules to perform actions specific to your business. By the end you will create an entire cluster of virtualized machines, all of which have your applications and all their dependencies installed automatically. Finally, you'll test your Ansible playbooks.
4.Ansible: Up and Running: Automating Configuration Management and Deployment the Easy Way
Author: Lorin Hochstein
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (May 15, 2015)
Among the many configuration management tools available, Ansible has some distinct advantages—it’s minimal in nature, you don’t need to install anything on your nodes, and it has an easy learning curve. This practical guide shows you how to be productive with this tool quickly, whether you’re a developer deploying code to production or a system administrator looking for a better automation solution.
Author Lorin Hochstein shows you how to write playbooks (Ansible’s configuration management scripts), manage remote servers, and explore the tool’s real power: built-in declarative modules. You’ll discover that Ansible has the functionality you need and the simplicity you desire.
5.Practical Network Automation: Leverage the power of Python and Ansible to optimize your network
Author: Abhishek Ratan
Publisher: Packt Publishing (November 16, 2017)
Network automation is the use of IT controls to supervise and carry out every-day network management functions. It plays a key role in network virtualization technologies and network functions.
The book starts by providing an introduction to network automation, SDN, and its applications, which include integrating DevOps tools to automate the network efficiently. It then guides you through different network automation tasks and covers various data digging and reporting methodologies such as IPv6 migration, DC relocations, and interface parsing, all the while retaining security and improving data center robustness. The book then moves on to the use of Python and the management of SSH keys for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, all followed by practical use cases. The book also covers the importance of Ansible for network automation including best practices in automation, ways to test automated networks using different tools, and other important techniques.
6.Network Programmability and Automation: Skills for the Next-Generation Network Engineer
Author: Jason Edelman (Author), Scott S. Lowe (Author), Matt Oswalt (Author)
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (March 3, 2018)
Like sysadmins before them, network engineers are finding that they cannot do their work manually anymore. As the field faces new protocols, technologies, delivery models, and a pressing need for businesses to be more agile and flexible, network automation is becoming essential. This practical guide shows network engineers how to use a range of technologies and tools—including Linux, Python, JSON, and XML—to automate their systems through code.
Network programming and automation will help you simplify tasks involved in configuring, managing, and operating network equipment, topologies, services, and connectivity. Through the course of the book, you’ll learn the basic skills and tools you need to make this critical transition.
7.Ansible Quick Start Guide: Control and monitor infrastructures of any size, physical or virtual
Author: Mohamed Alibi
Publisher: Packt Publishing (September 28, 2018)
Configuration Management (CM) tools help administrators reduce their workload. Ansible is one of the best Configuration Management tools, and can act as an orchestrator for managing other CMs. This book is the easiest way to learn how to use Ansible as an orchestrator and a Configuration Management tool. With this book, you will learn how to control and monitor computer and network infrastructures of any size,physical or virtual.
You will begin by learning about the Ansible client-server architecture. To get started, you will set up and configure an Ansible server. You will then go through the major features of Ansible: Playbook and Inventory. Then, we will look at Ansible systems and network modules.
You will then use Ansible to enable infrastructure automated configuration management, followed by best practices for using Ansible roles and community modules.
8.Ansible for DevOps: Server and configuration management for humans
Author: Jeff Geerling
Publisher: Midwestern Mac, LLC; 1 edition (October 10, 2015)
Ansible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool (with a few other tricks up its sleeve). This book will help those familiar with the command line and basic shell scripting start using Ansible to provision and manage anywhere from one to thousands of servers.
9.OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook - Fourth Edition: Over 100 practical recipes to help you build and operate OpenStack cloud computing, storage, networking, and automation
Author: Kevin Jackson (Author), Cody Bunch (Author), Egle Sigler (Author), James Denton (Author)
Publisher: Packt Publishing; 4th Revised edition edition (January 29, 2018)
This is the fourth edition of the industry-acclaimed OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook, created by four recognized OpenStack experts. It has now been updated to work with the latest OpenStack builds, using tools and processes based on their collective and vast OpenStack experience.
OpenStack Open Source Cloud software is one of the most used cloud infrastructures to support a wide variety of use cases, from software development to big data analysis. It is developed by a thriving community of individual developers from around the globe and backed by most of the leading players in the cloud space today. We make it simple to implement, massively scalable, and able to store a large pool of data and networking resources. OpenStack has a strong ecosystem that helps you provision your cloud storage needs. Add OpenStack's enterprise features to reduce the cost of your business.
This book will begin by showing you the steps to build up an OpenStack private cloud environment using Ansible. You'll then discover the uses of cloud services such as the identity service, image service, and compute service. You'll dive into Neutron, the OpenStack Networking service, and get your hands dirty with configuring networks, routers, load balancers, and more.
10.Containerization with Ansible 2: Implement container management, deployment, and orchestration within the Ansible ecosystem
Author: Aric Renzo
Publisher: Packt Publishing (December 7, 2017)
Today many organizations are adopting containerization and DevOps methodologies to improve the flexibility and reliability of deploying new applications. Building custom application containers often means leveraging brittle and oftentimes complex Dockerfiles that can lead to cumbersome, multi-layered containers. Ansible Container brings a new workflow for managing the development of containers from development all the way through to production. The goal of this book is to get you up and running with Ansible Container so that you can create container images from Ansible roles, run containers locally, and deploy them to the cloud.
11.DevOps for Networking
Author: Steven Armstrong
Publisher: Packt Publishing (October 28, 2016)
Implement networking fundamentals to the DevOps culture with ease, improving your organization's stability
Leverage various open source tools such as Puppet and Ansible in order to automate your network
This step-by-step learning guide collaborating the functions of developers and network administrators
12.Mastering Ansible: Master the ins and outs of advanced operations with Ansible, 2nd EditionMastering Ansible: Master the ins and outs of advanced operations with Ansible, 2nd Edition
Author: Jesse Keating
Publisher: Packt Publishing; 2nd Revised edition edition (March 30, 2017)
This book provides you with the knowledge you need to understand how Ansible 2.1 works at a fundamental level and leverage its advanced capabilities. You'll learn how to encrypt Ansible content at rest and decrypt data at runtime. You will master the advanced features and capabilities required to tackle the complex automation challenges of today and beyond.
You will gain detailed knowledge of Ansible workflows, explore use cases for advanced features, craft well thought out orchestrations, troubleshoot unexpected behaviour, and extend Ansible through customizations. Finally, you will discover the methods used to examine and debug Ansible operations, helping you to understand and resolve issues.
By the end of the book, the readers will be able to unlock the true power of the Ansible automation engine and will tackle complex real world actions with ease.
13.Ansible Playbook Essentials: Design automation blueprints using Ansible's playbooks to orchestrate and manage your multitier infrastructure
Author: Gourav Shah
Publisher: Packt Publishing (August 5, 2015)
Ansible Playbook Essentials will show you how to write a blueprint of your infrastructure, encompassing multitier applications using Ansible's playbooks. Beginning with basic concepts such as plays, tasks, handlers, inventory, and YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML) syntax that Ansible uses, you'll understand how to organize your code into a modular structure. Building on this, you will study techniques to create data-driven playbooks with variables, templates, logical constructs, and encrypted data, which will further strengthen your application skills in Ansible. Adding to this, the book will also take you through advanced clustering concepts, such as discovering topology information about other nodes in the cluster and managing multiple environments with isolated configurations. As you approach the concluding chapters, you can expect to learn about orchestrating infrastructure and deploying applications in a coordinated manner.
14.DevOps for SharePoint: With Packer, Terraform, Ansible, and Vagrant
Author: Oscar Medina (Author), Ethan Schumann (Contributor)
Publisher: Apress; 1st ed. edition (October 30, 2018)
Deploy a SharePoint farm in a repeatable, predictable, and reliable fashion using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) techniques to automate provisioning. Savvy IT pros will learn how to use DevOps practices and open source tools to greatly reduce costs, and streamline management operations for SharePoint farms deployed via Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, or on premise.
DevOps for SharePoint will help you navigate the complex challenges of deploying and managing SharePoint Server farms. You will learn how to reduce time-consuming tasks and errors when generating development, testing, or production environments. And you will benefit from learning proven methods to apply Microsoft updates with minimal downtime and productivity loss. Whether you are a SharePoint architect, IT pro, or developer helping customers with the SharePoint platform, this book will teach you the most useful DevOps practices to tackle those issues and broaden your skill set.
15.Ansible 2 Cloud Automation Cookbook: Write Ansible playbooks for AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and OpenStack
Author: Aditya Patawari (Author), Vikas Aggarwal (Author)
Publisher: Packt Publishing (February 28, 2018)
Ansible has a large collection of inbuilt modules to manage various cloud resources. The book begins with the concepts needed to safeguard your credentials and explain how you interact with cloud providers to manage resources. Each chapter begins with an introduction and prerequisites to use the right modules to manage a given cloud provider. Learn about Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other providers. Each chapter shows you how to create basic computing resources, which you can then use to deploy an application. Finally, you will be able to deploy a sample application to demonstrate various usage patterns and utilities of resources.
