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Learning Path: Ansible: Secured Automation with Ansible 2
Rating: 4.3 out of 5(42 ratings)
408 students
Created byPackt Publishing
Last updated 12/2017
English

What you'll learn

  • Configure and manage your infrastructure using Ansible Playbooks
  • Integrate Ansible with various cloud providers such as AWS and Openstack
  • Harden your Nginx Web Server
  • Set up the firewall along with managing SELinux for security
  • Setup Ansible Tower and learn to use it
  • Install Ansible and connect to Windows boxes and network devices

Course content

3 sections • 69 lectures • 7h 1m total length

  • The Course Overview4:25

    This video provides an overview of the entire course.

  • What Is Ansible?3:29

    In this section, you'll learn about the most popular uses of the Ansible automation tool. It's a tool that you can use to manage the full life cycle of your infrastructure.

  • Why Ansible?3:09

    Ansible is more than just configuration management, like many other tools in this space. It's also much more lightweight than competitors like Puppet and Chef—to configure a server, all you need is an SSH login and Python 2 installed.

  • Demonstration – From Bash to Ansible19:28

    We'll use a simple example: installing and configuring an nginx server and a simple static HTML website, first using bash and then using Ansible.

  • Course Layout2:54

    This video gives you an overview of how the course is structured. The focus is on practical, real-world applications, since that prepares you for real-life application of this knowledge.

  • Basic Ansible Vocabulary2:53

    In this video, we'll cover the basic Ansible vocabulary. You'll have many basic questions answered.

  • New Features in Ansible 2.03:30

    In this video, you'll learn about the new features and improvements that Ansible 2.0 offers.

  • Creating an Ansible Home Base3:02

    In this video, we'll set up an environment that you can use to safely practice everything you see in this course.

  • Installing Ansible5:48

    In this video, you'll learn the three most popular ways to install Ansible, and decide which one is right for you.

  • Bleeding-Edge Ansible Installation8:30

    In this video, we'll cover how to build Ansible directly from its repository. This method is useful if you absolutely need a bleeding-edge feature, or if you're interested in contributing to the Ansible source code.

  • Setting up our Test Environment7:33

    In this video you'll learn how to simulate test machines with LXC (Linux Containers). LXC is a lightweight precursor to Docker which will let us configure some test hosts that we can run Ansible against.

  • Target Machine Requirements3:07

    Ansible only requires two things: Python 2 and a running SSH service. In this video, I'll show you the 10-second process that prepares a brand-new host for Ansible.

  • Ansible Configuration Hierarchy5:16

    In this video, you'll learn where Ansible looks for its primary configuration file, and the different ways in which you can approach configuring Ansible.

  • Ansible Hosts Inventory File5:19

    How does Ansible know which hosts to configure? The Ansible Hosts (Inventory) file!

  • Ad-Hoc Commands7:54

    Ad-Hoc Commands are simple one-off commands that perform a single action on a target host. These simple replacements for small bash scripts or 'for' loops are run from the command-line, and work well for cases where a full-featured Playbook is overkill. You'll see Ad-Hoc commands for doing several things across one server, or many servers at once

  • Introduction top playbooks19:40

    Playbooks are the Ansible feature you'll be working with on most projects. In this video, you'll learn the three components that make a Playbook what it is: tasks, templates, and handlers.

  • Playbook Structure11:16

    In this video, you'll learn how to structure your playbooks for maximum readability, predictability, and flexibility. You'll learn about Roles, and how they can help you reuse code. Note: For this course, we're not using every available Playbook feature, because it can make things excessively complex. We're focusing on the practical 90% of features that you'll be using every day.

  • Introduction to Modules6:01

    In this video, you'll learn what Ansible modules are and how they help you get things done.

  • Common Modules11:29

    In this video, you'll learn about some of the most popular (and useful!) Ansible modules. At the end of this video, you'll have a list of modules to dig into, which you can use to manage.

  • Variables and Facts17:55

    In this video, you'll learn about how Ansible deals with Variables and Facts

  • Real-Life Playbook: Mattermost Deployment12:02

    In this video, you'll see a real-life web application deployment. We'll be setting up Mattermost, an open-source alternative to the popular Slack team-chat application.

  • Real-Life Playbook Walkthrough14:43

    This video reviews everything we just saw in the application deployment. After watching this video, you'll start to have an intuitive 'real-world' grasp of how a playbook works.

  • Debugging and Troubleshooting13:06

    While developing Ansible automation, you'll be doing a lot of troubleshooting as part of the process. In this video, I'll show you the most common Ansible features that you'll use for debugging, along with some of the most common Ansible errors you'll encounter.

  • Conditionals and Control Flow4:52

    In this video, you'll learn about the control flow that you can use in your Tasks and Plays. At the end of this video, you'll be comfortable with Ansible iteration constructs

  • Templating, Control Flow, and Iteration in Jinja27:37

    In addition to control flow in your YAML files, we can also introduce control flow for our file content in your Jinja2 templates.

  • YAML Basics4:37

    We have been using YAML to write your Playbooks, Plays, Tasks, and Handlers. Now it's time to dig in for a moment and learn some of the rules you need to keep in mind when working with this markup language.

  • Ansible Blocks3:59

    Task Blocks are one of the useful new features in Ansible 2.0. They allow you to group related tasks together, so you can tie control-flow to larger chunks of actions. This is something that comes in handy for larger actions which are made up of several tasks.

  • Performance and Execution Strategies8:10

    Ansible has two built-in execution strategies that affect how it applies tasks to hosts. Knowing whether you want to use the linear (default) strategy or the free strategy can make the difference between completing a deployment in minutes or hours

  • Ansible Galaxy4:58

    Ansible Galaxy allows you to leverage open-source roles that other people in the Ansible community have created. It can be useful for studying code that others have written, or for quickly getting some functionality that you need without having to write it from scratch.

  • Security4:13

    In this video, I'll cover some of the basic security features. This is essentially a quick list of "best practices" and "things to watch out for." Using Ansible for provisioning, deployment, configuration management, and orchestration does not absolve you of managing the security of your systems...you'll still have to invest thought and planning into how you do this.

  • Ansible in the Cloud3:01

    Ansible can be used to provision services on all major cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), OpenStack, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and more. There are also Ansible modules for on-premise virtualization and cloud solutions, which makes it really easy to get started.

  • Ansible AWS Demo25:10

    In this demonstration, you'll see how the Mattermost Deployment playbook was ported to Amazon AWS.

  • Ansible Tower2:30

    This video will give you a quick taste of Ansible's commercial solution: Ansible Tower. This is a web application wrapper around the core open-source Ansible toolset

Requirements

  • Good knowledge of Python and SSH is needed
  • No prior knowledge on Ansible

Description

Security plays a major role in protecting your system or data. Ansible makes it easy for you to secure any part of your infrastructure, including setting firewalls, providing authentication to users and groups, and setting custom security policies. It allows you to write automation procedures and use them across your entire infrastructure. So if you are a system administrator or an IT professional who is keen to automate your organization’s infrastructure, then you should surely go for this Learning Path.

Packt’s Video Learning Paths are a series of individual video products put together in a logical and stepwise manner such that each video builds on the skills learned in the video before it.  The highlights of this Learning Path are:

  • Increase the functionality of your infrastructure by integrating with cloud platforms such as AWS and OpenStack
  • Understand how to use Ansible 2 for various use cases such as fraud detection, network security, governance, and so on
  • Implement the advanced usage of Ansible Tower
  • Learn complex hardening and migrate security infrastructures

Let’s take a quick look at your learning journey. You will with Ansible 2, including its installation, the problems it solves, and more. You will then create your very first playbook. You will understand the power of variables and quickly be able to manage environments and implement strategies. You will then go through the concepts that are used to automate security in your infrastructure and how to monitor your system so that it remains compliant. You will also use Ansible Tower to secure your machines and cloud systems. Moving forward, you will explore some security use cases such as network device hardening, application security, fraud detection and prevention, governance, and risk assessment. Finally, this Learning Path will teach you how to maintain the compliance state of your system by applying configurations to your system along with some troubleshooting techniques.

By the end of this Learning Path, you will have mastered automating different layers of security in your infrastructure.

Meet Your Experts:

We have the best works of the following esteemed author to ensure that your learning journey is smooth:

  • David Cohenhas has been a system administrator, platform engineer, devops engineer, and software developer in everything from small businesses to growing companies (100+ employees) and large tech/engineering firms (10,000+ employees). Most of his work has centered around Linux and Unix system administration, web security, and software development in Python, Ruby, Javascript, and Go. He has also done stranger things like helping to design two tier-4 datacenters and being an Infantryman (not at the same time). On his tutorial Linux YouTube channel, he has helped thousands of people learn the basics (and not-so-basics) of system administration, devops, and software engineering.
  • Anish Nath is a developer, author, and a hacker who is willing to contribute and learn. He is an active member of StackOverflow and a Devops Engineer. He has expertise as a security advocate and security architect. He is experienced in handling security issues such as performing white-hat hacking. He is a community-oriented developer.

Who this course is for:

  • This Learning Path is targeted at system administrators or IT professionals who are keen to automate their organization’s infrastructure

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