Ansible 2 for Security Automation and Implementing DevOps

Ansible is a simple, open source, IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs. Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible helps take software updates from testing to deployment in a short period of time. It is a great solution for orchestrating DevOps pipelines. Whether you want to manage an entire cloud region, configure network devices, or orchestrate configuration changes across Linux or Windows machines, Ansible is up to the challenge!

This comprehensive 3-in-1 course follows a practical, informative, step-by-step approach to safeguard your system with advanced features of Ansible as well as automate your DevOps and Continuous Delivery software delivery process. You’ll begin with configuring and managing your infrastructure using Ansible Playbooks. You’ll then integrate Ansible with various Cloud Providers such as AWS and OpenStack. Moving further, you’ll build virtual machines to automate testing and deploying your applications. Finally, you’ll create and deploy a containerized application by using Ansible to build custom Docker images.

Towards the end of this course, you'll learn Ansible 2 and perform security automation, CI/CD for software delivery using DevOps with Ansible.

Contents and Overview

This training program includes 3 complete courses, carefully chosen to give you the most comprehensive training possible.

The first course, Ansible 2 for Beginners, covers automating manual tasks for your organization with ease using the highly reliable Ansible 2. In this course, you will get started with Ansible 2.0, including its installation, the problems it solves, and more. We will also walk through creating your very first playbooks. You’ll understand the power of variables and quickly be able to manage environments and implement strategies. You will find out how to integrate with different cloud platforms and be introduced to Ansible Galaxy and Tower, which are Ansible's enterprise tooling for supporting large-scale infrastructure. By the end of this course, you will be well versed in the basics of Ansible and be able to automate your organizational infrastructure easily.

The second course, Ansible 2: Advancements with Security Automation, covers safeguarding your system with advanced features of Ansible 2. The course starts with basic Ansible concepts and later progresses to the advanced features of Ansible 2. You'll start with the usage of Ansible with non-Linux targets, before then moving on to discuss some advanced uses of Ansible Tower. Ansible Tower makes it easy to control the way your infrastructure is configured via configuration definitions and continuous remediation. Next, we will look at secure user management with Ansible managing multiple user and different permissions. We will be closely looking at more complex hardening with STIG and CIS.

The third course, Hands-On DevOps with Ansible, covers automating your DevOps and Continuous Delivery software delivery process using Ansible 2.x. In this course, we show how a DevOps pipeline can speed up your software development. We will use DevOps practices to automate your building and testing environments to push software into production. You will use Ansible to automate your DevOps pipeline. Whether you test and deploy applications on-premise or in the cloud, and whether you build full systems or containers with Docker and Kubernetes, by the end of the course you will be able to develop and deploy reliable applications with speed using Ansible.

Towards the end of this course, you'll learn Ansible 2 and perform security automation, CI/CD for software delivery using DevOps with Ansible.

About the Authors

• David Cohen: I've 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 my work has centered on Linux and UNIX system administration, web security, and software development in Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and Go. I've also done stranger things like helping to design two Tier-4 data centers and being an Infantryman (not at the same time). On my tutorial Linux YouTube channel, I've helped tens of 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.

  
  

• Alan Hohn is a Software Architect who primarily works in Java, Go, and Python. He has a lot of experience re-architecting embedded systems and in combining embedded and enterprise approaches. Currently, he works as a Lockheed Martin Fellow encouraging the adoption of virtualization, DevOps, and cloud technologies. This also means that he frequently tries out new technologies and new approaches. He enjoys teaching on technical topics and enjoys hearing from those who find his courses useful. He is employed by Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems and his personal blog is called Variegated.