Ansible Automation: From Zero to Production
Building Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Automation with Ansible
What's Included:
Key Highlights
- Production-focused Ansible workflows
- Scalable project structures with roles
- Security and secrets management
- Testing and CI/CD integration
- Enterprise-ready automation practices
Overview
Master Ansible automation from basics to production. Learn playbooks, roles, security, scaling, and CI/CD integration with real-world examples.
The Problem
Manual infrastructure management does not scale and leads to errors, inconsistencies, and operational risk.
The Solution
This book teaches you how to automate infrastructure and applications reliably using Ansible with proven production-ready practices.
About This Book
From Ansible Basics to Production-Ready Automation
Ansible Automation: From Zero to Production is a practical, hands-on guide to building reliable and scalable automation using Ansible. Ansible is one of the most popular automation tools in DevOps, allowing you to manage infrastructure, deploy applications, and enforce configurations across thousands of servers.
This book takes you beyond simple playbooks and teaches you how to design, secure, test, and operate Ansible automation in real production environments.
What You Will Learn
- Installing and configuring Ansible on various platforms
- Understanding Ansible architecture: inventory, modules, and plugins
- Writing clean, idempotent, and effective playbooks
- Managing static and dynamic inventories
- Variables, facts, and conditionals
- Using roles for modular, reusable automation
- Ansible Galaxy: finding and using community roles
- Securing automation with Ansible Vault
- Testing playbooks with Molecule and linting
- Running Ansible at scale: strategies and optimizations
- Integrating Ansible into CI/CD pipelines
- Ansible Tower/AWX for enterprise management
Who Is This Book For?
This book is designed for IT professionals who want to automate infrastructure. It is ideal for:
- System administrators automating server management
- DevOps engineers building infrastructure as code
- Cloud engineers managing AWS, Azure, or GCP resources
- IT teams standardizing configurations across environments
- Anyone moving from manual administration to automation
Why This Book?
This book focuses on best practices, real-world workflows, and production-readiness, making it ideal for DevOps engineers and system administrators who need reliable automation.
Prerequisites
Basic Linux command-line experience is required. Python knowledge is helpful but not mandatory.
Author: Marco Rinaldi
Who Is This Book For?
- System administrators
- DevOps engineers
- Cloud and infrastructure engineers
- Linux professionals
- Anyone transitioning into automation roles
Who Is This Book NOT For?
- Absolute beginners to Linux
- Readers looking for GUI-based automation tools
- Those not interested in infrastructure automation
Table of Contents
- Why Automation Matters
- Understanding Ansible Architecture
- Installing and Setting Up Ansible
- Ansible Inventory Basics
- Ansible Playbook Fundamentals
- Common Ansible Modules
- Working with Variables
- Templates with Jinja2
- Conditionals, Loops, and Error Handling
- Organizing Code with Roles
- Structuring Large Ansible Projects
- Securing Ansible Automation
- Managing Secrets with Ansible Vault
- Automating Linux System Administration
- Application Deployment with Ansible
- Running Ansible at Scale
- Testing and Validating Ansible Code
- Ansible in CI/CD Pipelines
- Day-2 Operations and Maintenance
- From Ansible User to Automation Engineer
Requirements
- Basic Linux command-line knowledge
- Access to one or more Linux systems
- No prior Ansible experience required
