Introduction to Ansible Transcripts
Chapter: What's Next
Lecture: Course Recap
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We've covered a lot of ground together over the past few hours. Now that you know how to configure servers and deploy applications with Ansible
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you've got a strong foundation to be able to do almost anything you want with the tool. Let's recap a little bit where we've been.
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We talked about why Ansible is such a great tool for configuration management how it's made configuration management much easier
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than alternative tools that came before it. We worked through the initial concepts like modules, tasks, roles, playbooks
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and the inventory files as the core pieces that we needed to know about to use Ansible. As we started our first playbook and expanded upon it
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we learned to write our playbooks and then run them against the server and perform useful tasks like creating deployer users
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instead of logging in as a root so that we could perform any step that we wanted to take on a remote server. Most of our playbooks consist of YAML
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and we wrote a bunch of it together. Got our top-level playbook.yml file and then the individual tasks combined together under roles
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like common, or web server, or database server. As we got comfortable with writing simple playbooks like this, we learned about working with data
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adding variables, reading environment variables using templates as our input data and encrypting data as well.
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We added a group_vars file and learned how to encrypt it and we learned how to use templates to configure services such as Nginx.
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We combined the variables with the templates executed by tasks and Ansible to create our configuration on remote servers.
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Encrypting files consist of using Ansible Vault the encrypt and decrypt command and passing in the vault password whenever we run our playbook
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that contains sensitive information so that Vault could decrypt the data before it is run and then re-encrypt it once the playbook is over
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so that the information stays secret. With all of our concepts in place, we work through building
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a good size Ansible playbook to configure multiple servers. We had a bunch of common operations we wanted to apply to all servers in our common role.
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Then, we separated out the web server and database server roles to differentiate our server types.
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You can try to extend this model with your own caching load balancing, and other server roles when necessary for your application.
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Finally, we took a simple prototype application combined it with the playbook we built in Chapter Six added enhanced tasks within our roles
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to deploy the application, to ansibledeploymentexample.com. You should now be able to use Ansible playbooks as a base
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for automating deployments of your own applications. You may need to look through Ansible's documentation for some additional modules
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depending on what you're trying to do but you're well on your way towards using Ansible for its intended purpose as a configuration management tool.
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Remember, take a look at the https://github.com/fullstackPython/book-and-video-code-examples so you can take the Ansible playbook
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modify it for your own purposes and use it within your own projects.