Ansible Advanced - Hands-On - DevOps

Explore building a basic web application with Python Flask and MySQL on a single server, a use case for deploying with Ansible across monolithic or distributed architectures.

Demonstrates deploying a simple web application from scratch using manual method, including server identification, installing Python dependencies, and setting up MySQL and Flask. Automate this process later with Ansible playbooks.

Create an inventory file and a playbook to deploy a monolithic web application on a single server, outlining tasks and structure for an advanced Ansible playbook.

Automate web app deployment with an Ansible playbook, covering inventory and host grouping, dependency installation, MySQL setup, and copying App.py to start the web service.

Define host variables in a separate host_vars file and use group_vars for better separation, and include modular tasks like deploy_db.yaml and deploy_web.yaml to reuse tasks.

Learn to modularize an Ansible playbook by moving variables to host_vars and group_vars, splitting tasks into deploy_db and deploy_web, and using include for reusable server deployments.

Organize Ansible playbooks with roles, creating a standard folder structure and auto-initialized README. Apply roles to separate MySQL DB and Flask Web servers with the roles directive and Ansible Galaxy.

Modularize your infrastructure by creating and organizing roles in Ansible, moving tasks into role-specific main.yml files for reuse. Share these roles with the Ansible Galaxy community.

Execute long-running tasks asynchronously in Ansible using the async directive and poll directive to manage timeouts, then register results and enable parallel execution with async_status and ansible_job_id.

Learn how Ansible strategy governs playbook execution, comparing linear (default), free, and serial batch modes, and tune parallelism with forks, percentages, and Ansible.cfg.

Learn error handling in Ansible playbooks by managing failures across multiple servers with any_errors_fatal and ignore_errors, and using register and fail_when to detect errors.

Master Jinja2 templating in ansible by using variables in curly braces and testing with the debug module, applying filters such as upper, lower, title, replace, default, min, max, and join.

Explore lookups in advanced Ansible topics by reading credentials from a comma-delimited credentials.csv file and retrieving passwords for target hosts during playbooks.

Secure credentials with Ansible Vault by encrypting the inventory, using options such as ask-vault-pass, vault-password-file, or a python script, and viewing or creating encrypted files.