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

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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. With this updated second edition, you’ll learn 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.

Authors Lorin Hochstein and René Moser show you how to write playbooks (Ansible’s configuration management scripts), manage remote servers, and explore the tool’s real built-in declarative modules. You’ll discover that Ansible has the functionality you need—and the simplicity you desire.

Manage Windows machines, and automate network device configurationManage your fleet from your web browser with Ansible TowerUnderstand how Ansible differs from other configuration management systemsUse the YAML file format to write your own playbooksWork with a complete example to deploy a non-trivial applicationDeploy applications to Amazon EC2 and other cloud platformsCreate Docker images and deploy Docker containers with AnsibleThis book is best read start to finish, with later chapters building on earlier ones. Because it’s written in a tutorial style, you can follow along on your own machine. Most examples focus on web applications.

718 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 8, 2014

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Lorin Hochstein

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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
Profile Image for Hesam.
164 reviews18 followers
March 28, 2022
یکی از جذابیت‌ها� همیشگی دنیای کامپیوترها برام ماشینی‌کرد� و آتُمیت‌کرد� فرآیندها بوده
در برنامه‌نویس� همین لذت را تجربه می‌کن� اما انگار کن کل یک سناریوی کامل از صفر تا صد را یکجا بنویسی و اجرا کنی
نکته‌� جالب کتاب‌ها� فنی (طبعا تجربه‌� من در برق و کامپیوتر هست) اینه که خالی از حکمت‌ها� زیسته زندگی نیستند
جایی از کتاب اشاره‌ا� به سخنی از آلن کِی، دانشمند علوم کامپیوتر برنده جایزه‌� تورینگ و از پیشگامان برنامه‌نویس� شیءگرا دارد که بسیار قابل تامل است:

simple things should be simple
complex things should be possible
Profile Image for Sebastian Gebski.
1,150 reviews1,256 followers
June 14, 2018
4-4.5 stars :)

I had a short list of issues with this book & I remember that these were not really trivial ones, but ... I've lost it :) So all I do remember now is purely positive:

* proper introduction to Ansible: CHECK!
* practical examples: CHECK!
* application in cloud scenarios: CHECK!
* well shaped code samples: CHECK!
* some 'beyond the basics' scenarios: CHECK!
* Ansible + containers: CHECK!
* day-to-day work (ops) with Ansible: CHECK!

Sometimes it was a bit dry, some topics were not interesting at all (Tower ...), but it's a decent start. If you decide to rely on web tutorials only it'd not be a big loss, but this book surely can't be called a waste of time & money.
Profile Image for D.
414 reviews6 followers
May 9, 2017
Ansible is deceptively simple. In a few hours, you can have the main idea and be writing playbooks. There are a number of nuances though that will make your life much easier. Do yourself a favor and read this book.
13 reviews1 follower
May 13, 2016


Superb - The Ansible bible

Ansible up and running is a really super addition to the O’Reilly up and running series.

Starting with the basics Lorin takes his readers through the little and large of Ansible.

The book starts with the very basics and builds all the way, you’ll see how to scale your ansible deployments in terms of both complexity and capacity.

Topics include:

The basics, complex play books, scaling using Roles, multiple hosts etc

Writing custom modules - nice to know how

Intengration with - Vagrant, Amazon Web Service, Docker

Debugging

Ansible is a lot of fun to use, it’s simple but powerful and Ansible up and Running provides the perfect text to let you learn and enjoy Ansible.

Pros:

I really like the idea of a common deployment theme (mezzanine) which runs throughout the book.

Nice appedix on SSH - very welcome since ansible uses this under the hood.

Cons:

Some of the examples I tried didn’t work out of the box. Be sure you define versions when you install things via pip (Lorin actually shows you how in chapter 6)

I can see this book becoming the Ansible bible - if some one writes an Ansible cookbook to stand besides it we’re all home and dry.

So would I recomend the book: Without doubt, no matter what your level of ansible use I can bet you’ll gain from reading through this. If you’re a beginner, just like me, it’s absoluetely SUPER

I’m a big fan of the O’Reilly up and running series and can only hope they continue to produce such informative and fun books (please give us more).
20 reviews
April 5, 2021
This book describes a lot of ansible features without focusing too much on a single one of them. It might be a little outdated in some parts some bit ly links do not point to the correct place any more, but it lays out the concepts of ansible just fine. I'd prefer if the author described ansible vault a little more though, because it seems like an important ansible component and the book left me thinking about what scenarios it could be utilized in.
4 reviews1 follower
December 21, 2018
This is an excellent guide to using Ansible that I find myself frequently referring back to. While the online Ansible documentation is very helpful for working with individual modules, it can be harder to "put it all together." That's where Ansible Up & Running comes in.
227 reviews1 follower
February 18, 2020
Książka o dużym potencjale. Dużo przykładów, również dla początkujących z Ansible. Niemniej trzeba znać podstawy Linuxa. Chociaż Ansible jest też na Windowsa. Na pewno do niej wrócę, jeżeli będę chciał coś sprawdzić.
Profile Image for yacoob.
247 reviews7 followers
September 8, 2015
Very good, no-nonsense Ansible introduction. I'd probably rearrange the sections a bit - the debugging chapter tucked at the very end would be more useful to me with my hands-on approach if it'd appear somewhere past the initial concepts. I could probably also shave some of the additional explanations ("here's how to make script executable") - at few points they seemed really out of place, and unnecessary. This way or the other, it was a very informative book. Recommended to anyone who's considering using Ansible.
Profile Image for Rrrrrron.
263 reviews22 followers
January 15, 2016
Great intro. Concise and to the point for someone who knows little about dev ops beyond basic scipting and setting up his own development environments on a unix/linux machine (mostly, python/flask, node, react/flux/webpack). Stopped after page 80-ish as we moved back to Heroku from Digitial Ocean as we realized that there was just too much to do for a 2 person startup at this point.
39 reviews
March 23, 2016
This is not your typical O'Reilly guide to a language. Written idiosyncratically, and not presenting simple recipes to get you started with Ansible, it is perhaps, as the title suggests, better for one who is already 'Up and Running' with Ansible, or, at least, complements this book with extensive reading of the online documentation.
Profile Image for Yamir Encarnacion.
21 reviews3 followers
May 31, 2015
This books covers all the basics well

This book is meant to be read from start to finish and in written in a tutorial style.

As a side note, I found Ansible to be easier to understand than Chef which I had already spent some time studying.
57 reviews1 follower
August 13, 2015
It will get you started with ansible pretty quickly, but after the first half of the book, you're probably going to switch back to the documentation unless you specifically need to use vagrant or docker.
Profile Image for Jaroslav.
5 reviews
November 22, 2015
Nice overview of the tool we're using at our company. Great chapters about using Ansible with AWS and Docker. I also learned about several arcane features of SSH. Some examples are too big and tedious for a book, I had to skim through them.
Profile Image for Luca.
78 reviews15 followers
May 16, 2016
Very good introduction. I liked the fact the author chose to deploy an app as a main drive of the examples
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews

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