Ansible: Up and Running: Automating Configuration Management and Deployment the Easy Way

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.


Understand how Ansible differs from other configuration management systems
Use the YAML file format to write your own playbooks
Learn Ansible's support for variables and facts

Work with a complete example to deploy a non-trivial application
Use roles to simplify and reuse playbooks
Make playbooks run faster with ssh multiplexing, pipelining, and parallelism
Deploy applications to Amazon EC2 and other cloud platforms
Use Ansible to create Docker images and deploy Docker containers