This week has told us that Ansible has taken over as the most used configuration management tool, especially in the cloud.
So with the year into full swing if you're looking to upgrade your skills or get ahead of the pack with Ansible, we have a list of the top five books you should get a hold of in 2019. The list is in no particular order.
Learn Ansible: Automate cloud, security, and network infrastructure using Ansible 2.x
Author: Russ McKendrick
Published: June 28, 2018
Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BDFD2VK
If you wanna learn Ansible, this is the first thing that pops up into your web browser when you enter "learn Ansible". So I thought it would be good to get a handle on what this book offers. Learn Ansible was released in June 2018 by Packt Publishing and offers an in depth look at using the application across multiple environments. The book offers a whopping 572 pages of information taking you from the basics, giving you a gentle introduction and then taking you through servers, networking, cloud, VMware, Windows and Security. This book gives a large amount of content and can be a little over whelming at some points but it should cover most of your scenarios you need to deploy to.
Table of Contents
- An Introduction to Ansible
- Installing and Running Ansible
- The Ansible Commands
- Deploying a LAMP stack
- Deploying WordPress
- Targeting Multiple Distributions
- The core network modules
- Moving to the Cloud
- Building out a cloud network
- Highly Available Cloud Deployments
- Building out a VMware deployment
- Ansible Windows Modules
- Hardening Your Servers Using Ansible and OpenSCAP
- Deploying WPScan and OWASP ZAP
- Introducing Ansible Tower and Ansible AWX
- Ansible Galaxy
- Next Steps with Ansible
- Assessments
Ansible Answers: Ansible Configuration Management From Start To Finish
Author: Vincent Sesto
Published: February 10, 2019
Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NKXGZNB
This is the newest of the bunch in this list and although published late last year through Leanpub has only been recently released via Amazon. This book describes itself as a quick tutorial on how to get up to speed with 80% of the most common tasks needed for Ansible configuration management. Even though it is just under 200 pages it gives you a good understanding of how to implement Ansible across designated server hardware as well as Amazon Web Services. It also covers a lot of lesser known features of Ansible like ansible-pull, ansible-lint and creating your own modules. Even though these features are not very well documented, this book provides good explanations of these features along with basic examples to get you started. The book also provides a breakdown of all the commands used through the book in the Appendix for quick reference.
Table Of Contents:
- Chapter 1, Configuration Management With Ansible
- Chapter 2, Ansible Playbooks
- Chapter 3, Extending Playbooks With Roles And Templates
- Chapter 4, Custom Ansible Modules, Vaults And Galaxies
- Chapter 5, Working With Ansible In The Amazon Cloud
- Chapter 6, AWS Template And Cloudformation Scripts
- Chapter 7, Ansible Checks and Variables
Ansible for DevOps: Server and configuration management for humans
Author: Jeff Geerling
Published: October 10, 2015
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B016G55NOU
This is the oldest of the books listed but has a rich history with a large following. New updates have been released since its initial release in 2015, and now covers Ansible version 2.7. The book was originally published through Midwestern Mac and is 450 pages. And runs through all the basics of Ansible, moving into more details and complex configuration management functions with real world examples provided. This book gives a really good approach to dealing with newer technologies like Docker, Jenkins and Kubernetes as well as wealth of other information on using Ansible.
Table of Contents
- Chapter 1 - Getting Started with Ansible
- Chapter 2 - Local Infrastructure Development: Ansible and Vagrant
- Chapter 3 - Ad-Hoc Commands
- Chapter 4 - Ansible Playbooks
- Chapter 5 - Ansible Playbooks - Beyond the Basics
- Chapter 6 - Playbook Organization - Roles, Includes, and Imports
- Chapter 7 - Inventories
- Chapter 8 - Ansible Cookbooks
- Chapter 9 - Deployments with Ansible
- Chapter 10 - Server Security and Ansible
- Chapter 11 - Automating Your Automation - Ansible Tower and CI/CD
- Chapter 12 - Automating HTTPS and TLS Certificates
- Chapter 13 - Docker and Ansible
- Chapter 14 - Kubernetes and Ansible
Ansible Quick Start Guide: Control and monitor infrastructures of any size, physical or virtual
Author: Mohamed Alibi
Published: September 18, 2018
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1789532930
This Ansible quick start guide gives you 214 pages of information and is also published through Packt Publishing. The book gives you an introduction on automating day to day tasks using playbooks, and gives you a good introduction on working with predefined modules that cover run Linux, Windows, networking and virtualisation administration.
It also gives you a breakdown and introduction of some of the more advanced features in Ansible including ansible-vault and Ansible Galaxy.
Table of Contents
- What is Ansible?
- Ansible Setup and Configuration
- Ansible Inventory and Playbook
- Ansible Modules
- Ansible Automated Infrastructure
- Ansible Coding for Configuration Management
- Ansible Galaxy and Community Roles
- Ansible Advanced Features
Ansible: From Beginner to Pro
Author: Michael Heap
Published: September 27, 2016
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LZAW11H
Published in 2016 by Apress it actually provides 170 pages of information that is not too dated. The book covers a lot of central concepts for Ansible that still hold true, so if you are short on cash and someone lends you a copy of this book, don't be too put off by the fact that it is a little dated. I am not sure it will make you a Pro at Ansible either as it doesn't cover quite a bit of information that the other books above do but it does have an entire chapter dedicated to writing your own Ansible modules.
Table of Contents
- Chapter 1: Getting Started
- Chapter 2: The Inventory File
- Chapter 3: Installing WordPress
- Chapter 4: Ansible Roles
- Chapter 5: Parametizing Playbooks
- Chapter 6: Writing Your Own Modules
- Chapter 7: Orchestrating AWS