Extending Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation tool that lets you manage your Infrastructure as a Code. It helps you deploy your applications and manage configurations, thus making life easier. Ansible, in most ways, is self sufficient to address most of your requirements.

Ideally, standard modules, libraries, or plugins are used to automate a given IT platform. Customizing Ansible can be done by custom module and plugin development.

This book shows you how to automate most of the tasks in your IT environment, thus minimizing the need to manually perform scheduled tasks and extend your Ansible implementation by developing customized modules and plugins.

You'll begin by getting an understanding of the fundamental aspects of extending the Ansible framework, such as custom functions and reusable modules. You'll then progress to building custom plugins and extensions using the fundamental building blocks explained earlier. We'll also show you how to automate some tasks using scripts. Finally, we'll demonstrate how these extensions can be seamlessly integrated into existing Ansible installations and explain how to conduct unit testing on these extensions to ensure they work as desired.