Ansible for DevOps: Server and configuration management for humans

Book Details

  • Full Title: Ansible for DevOps: Server and configuration management for humans

  • Author: Jeff Geerling

  • ISBN/URL: 978-0-9863934-1-9

  • Reading Period: 2019.08

  • Source: Ad-hoc browsing at the library

General Review

  • Read this book if you want to get some practical examples of how to use Ansible to manage actual servers.

Specific Takeaways

  • Ansible is a server orchestration tool: with Ansible, I can easily sent commands to multiple servers.

  • Ansible makes server managament easier by making commands idempotent, or providing ways to make idempotent commands.

  • It is easy to migrate from shell scripts style of server management to Ansible: you can simple use Ansible to run the scripts (while you slowly convert them to Ansible format).

  • Vagrant is a tool to manage virtual machines. Think of it as Docker, but for VMs. E.g., with Vagrant, you can specify a host, and choose whether the host will be created using VirtualBox or VMware.

  • When dealing with stateful programming, always consider making an operation idempotent (like how Ansible commands generally are). This will avoid untended state modifications.

To Internalize Now

  • Nil

To Learn/Do Soon

  • Get a book on Redis, Memcache, Kubernetes, Kafka, and Zookeeper to understand the related technologies.

To Revisit When Necessary

  • How to use Ansible to deploy and manage Node.js app, LAMP server, Apache Tomcat with Solr.

  • Example Code on GitHub

Other Resources Referred To

  • Nil