Release year: 2020

Author: Jeff Geerling

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Link to my handwritten notes

Review

As someone deeply involved in DevOps and automation within my current role, I found it essential to acquaint myself with Ansible, an open-source automation tool renowned for its applications in configuration management, application deployment, task automation, and orchestration.

What can I say about Ansible that probably hasn’t been said a thousand times before… It seems like a great tool to manage servers! I now picture it as a perfect complement to the IaC tools I was previously used to for managing infrastructure (e.g. Pulumi). While it allows for great extensibility, it feels like the design of Ansible always keeps it as simple as possible. That is the best of both worlds.

As for the book, while I wouldn’t classify it as a “riveting read”, I must say that it does a wonderful job as a guide post. The author did a great job of always leaving useful links and hints about things you might get use out of. In that sense, I expect that this will be a book I’ll come back to time and again for new ideas concerning Ansible.

In summary, if you’re new to Ansible, this seems like a great place to start. The learning curve of the book is smooth (assuming basic familiarity with other mainstream DevOps tools) and the topics discussed seem relevant.

Félix rating:
👍

⭐ Star quotes

1. (p. 313) Make sure you can already log in via your SSH key before you disable password-based SSH authentication.