Learn how to – Best Books To learn Docker and Ansible Automation 2023

Learn how to – Best Books To learn Docker and Ansible Automation 2023.

Introduction

Docker is a wonderful tool and technology built to make it easier for you to create, deploy, and run applications via containers. Once you have large numbers of containers to deploy and manage, it immediately becomes necessary to add more automation muscle into your plans and tasks. Another amazingly simple yet powerful tool called Ansible fits so well into this role. According to Ansible, it is a universal language, unraveling the mystery of how work gets done. It will turn tough tasks into repeatable playbooks that you can use in your day to day deployments. This guide provides some resources that will help you get an understanding of both technologies which you will leverage to make your performance sweeter and neater.

1. Implementing DevOps with Ansible 2

If you are a DevOps engineer, administrator, or developer and want to implement the DevOps environment in your organization using Ansible, then this book will guide you to automating all DevOps stages with ease using Ansible. Authored by Jonathan McAllister, it begins with the role of Ansible in the DevOps module, which covers fundamental DevOps practices and how Ansible is leveraged by DevOps organizations to implement consistent and simplified configuration management and deployment.

After that beautiful beginning, you will move on to Ansible with DevOps, where you will understand Ansible fundamentals and how Ansible Playbooks can be used for simple configuration management and deployment tasks. The flesh of the books will get you well grounded with the most that you need to know about Ansible internals. Talk about playbooks, advanced configuration management implementations, and use Ansible Vault to secure top-secret information in your organization. The last module, Scaling Ansible for the enterprise, is where you will integrate Ansible with CI and CD solutions and provision Docker containers using Ansible.

What you will take home at a glance:

• Get to the grips with the fundamentals of Ansible 2.2 and how you can benefit from leveraging Ansible for DevOps.
• Adapt the DevOps process and learn how Ansible and other tools can be used to automate it.
• Start automating Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery tasks using Ansible
• Maximize the advantages of tools such as Docker, Jenkins, JIRA, and many more to implement the DevOps culture.
• Integrate DevOps tools with Ansible
• Extend Ansible using Python and create custom modules that integrate with unique specific technology stacks
• Connect and control the states of various third-party applications such as GIT, SVN, Artifactory, Nexus, Jira, Hipchat, Slack, Nginx, and others.

2. Ansible: Up and Running: Automating Configuration Management and Deployment the Easy Way 2nd Edition

Authors Lorin Hochstein and René Moser bring you a good grounding of Ansible in this resource. Mixed with the intricacies of Docker and containers in general, you’ll learn how to be productive with Ansible quickly, whether you’re a developer deploying code to production or a system administrator looking for a better automation solution. You will be shown how to write playbooks (Ansible’s configuration management scripts), manage remote servers, and explore the tool’s real power: built-in declarative modules. You’ll discover that Ansible has the functionality you need—and the simplicity you desire.

According to the publishers, the most significant change is the addition of five new chapters. The book now covers callback plugins, Windows hosts, network hardware, and Ansible Tower. So much has been added to the ‘Complex Playbooks’ chapter that is now expanded to a second chapter called ‘Customizing Hosts, Runs and Handlers’. The Docker chapter has been rewriten to cover the new Docker modules.

In summary, you will glean the following from the book

• Manage Windows machines, and automate network device configuration
• Manage your fleet from your web browser with Ansible Tower
• Understand how Ansible differs from other configuration management systems
• Use the YAML file format to write your own playbooks
• Work with a complete example to deploy a non-trivial application
• Deploy applications to Amazon EC2 and other cloud platforms
• Create Docker images and deploy Docker containers with Ansible

3. Containerization with Ansible 2

The author Aric Renzo has experience working on many open source and free software project deployments for clients based on OpenStack, Ansible, Docker, Chef, SaltStack, and Kubernetes. He advised that building custom application containers often means leveraging brittle and oftentimes complex Dockerfiles that can lead to cumbersome, multi-layered containers. Ansible Container brings a new workflow for managing the development of containers from development all the way through to production. The goal of this book is to get you up and running with Ansible Container so that you can create container images from Ansible roles, run containers locally, and deploy them to the cloud.

The book progresses from a simple, single container application, to a complex application consisting of multiple, connected containers. You’ll learn how to run the application locally, how to deploy it to an OpenShift cluster running locally, and how to deploy it to a Kubernetes cluster running in the cloud.

Feature highlights of the resource include

• Use Ansible Container as an integral part of your workflow to increase flexibility and portability.
• Manage the container life cycle using existing Ansible roles and automate the entire container build, deployment and management process.
• A step-by-step guide that will get you up and running from building a simple container image to deploying a complex, multi-container app in the cloud.

4. Ansible for DevOps: Server and configuration management for humans 1st Edition

Jeff Geerling comes to aid those familiar with the command line and basic shell scripting to start using Ansible to provision and manage anywhere from one to thousands of servers. The book begins with the fundamentals, like installing Ansible, setting up a basic inventory file, and basic concepts. After grasping the basics, it progresses to guide you through Ansible’s many uses, including ad-hoc commands, basic and advanced playbooks, application deployments, multiple-provider server provisioning, and even Docker and Kubernetes orchestration!
It Covers Ansible 2.7!

5. Ansible Quick Start Guide

Mohamed Alibi authored this book to be the easiest way to learn how to use Ansible as an orchestrator and a Configuration Management tool. You will learn how to control and monitor computer and network infrastructures of any size, physical or virtual. Beginning with the very basics of understanding Ansible architecture to installing it, you will then go through the major features of Ansible: Playbook and Inventory. Then, we will look at Ansible systems and network modules. After exploring the meat of the resource, here is what the author intended you to learn:

Take away summary

• Implement Playbook YAML scripts and its capacities to simplify day-to-day tasks
• Setup Static and Dynamic Inventory
• Use Ansible predefined modules for Linux, Windows, networking, and virtualisation administration
• Organize and configure the host filesystem using storage and files modules
• Implement Ansible to enable infrastructure automated configuration management
• Simplify infrastructure administration
• Search and install new roles and enable them within Ansible
• Secure your data using Ansible Vault

6. Ansible: From Beginner to Pro

In less than 250 pages, this book by Michael Heap takes you from knowing nothing about configuration management to understanding how to use Ansible in a professional setting. If you are a beginner, you do not have anything to worry when you have this book in your hands because all of your needs are neatly covered herein.

You will learn how to create an Ansible playbook to automatically set up an environment, ready to install an open source project. You’ll extract common tasks into roles that you can reuse across all your projects, and build your infrastructure on top of existing open source roles and modules that are available for you to use. You will learn to build your own modules to perform actions specific to your business.

By the end of your study, you will create an entire cluster of virtualized machines, all of which have your applications and all their dependencies installed automatically. Written in clear and crisp way for easy comprehension, Ansible: From Beginner to Pro will teach you the key skills you need to be an Ansible professional.

Take aways from the book include

• Learn why Ansible is so popular and how to download and install it
• Create a playbook that automatically downloads and installs a popular open source project
• Use open source roles to complete common tasks, and write your own specific to your business
• Extend Ansible by writing your own modules
• Test your infrastructure using Test Kitchen and ServerSpec

7. Docker Deep Dive

This is the ultimate book for learning Docker, brought to you by Docker Captain and leading educator in the container ecosystem Nigel Poulton. This book is expertly written and has been featured on CNN and Forbes.

In this book, Docker is simplified and brought to life via Nigel’s unique and energetic approach. If you want to learn docker basics, give this book a short. Below is the link you can use to purchase it.

8. The Docker Book: Containerization is the new virtualization

This book is designed for SysAdmins, SREs, Operations staff, Developers and DevOps who are interested in deploying the open source container service Docker. It starts by introducing you to the basics of Docker and its components.

It book walks you through installing, deploying, managing, and extending Docker and how to use Docker to build containers and services to perform a variety of tasks.

9. Using Docker: Developing and Deploying Software with Containers

This book is Ideal for developers, operations engineers, and system administrators—especially those keen to embrace a DevOps approach. The core of the book walks you through the steps needed to develop, test, and deploy a web application with Docker.

• Get started with Docker by building and deploying a simple web application
• Use Continuous Deployment techniques to push your application to production multiple times a day
• Learn various options and techniques for logging and monitoring multiple containers
• Examine networking and service discovery: how do containers find each other and how do you connect them?
• Orchestrate and cluster containers to address load-balancing, scaling, failover, and scheduling
• Secure your system by following the principles of defense-in-depth and least privilege

10. Learning Docker – Second Edition

There is no way you can automate Docker if you do not understand what it all entails. Therefore, this book is ideal for developers, operations managers, and IT professionals who would like to learn about Docker and use it to build and deploy container-based apps authored by Jeeva S. Chelladhurai, Vinod Singh, and Pethuru Raj.

This guide will give you a tour of the new features of Docker and help you get started with Docker by building and deploying a simple application. It will walk you through the commands required to manage Docker images and containers. You’ll be shown how to download new images, run containers, list the containers running on the Docker host, and kill them. You’ll learn how to leverage Docker’s volumes feature to share data between the Docker host and its containers – this data management feature is also useful for persistent data.

You will add the following to your skills arsenal

• Develop containerized applications using the Docker version 17.03
• Build Docker images from containers and launch them
• Develop Docker images and containers leveraging Dockerfiles
• Use Docker volumes to share data
• Get to know how data is shared between containers
• Understand Docker Jenkins integration
• Gain the power of container orchestration
• Familiarize yourself with the frequently used commands such as docker exec, docker ps, docker top, and docker stats

11. Ansible 2 Cloud Automation Cookbook

This book by Aditya Patawari and Vikas Aggarwal targets system administrators, infrastructure engineers, or DevOps engineers who want to obtain practical knowledge about Ansible and its cloud deliverables.

Each chapter begins with an introduction and prerequisites to use the right modules to manage a given cloud provider. Learn about Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other providers. Each chapter also shows you how to create basic computing resources, which you can then use to deploy an application. Finally, you will be able to deploy a sample application to demonstrate various usage patterns and utilities of resources.

The juices you will enjoy in this guide include

• Using Ansible Vault to protect secrets
• Understanding how Ansible modules interact with cloud providers to manage resources
• Building cloud-based resources for your application
• Creating resources beyond simple virtual machines
• Writing tasks that can be reused to create resources multiple times
• Working with self-hosted clouds such as OpenStack and Docker
• Deploying a multi-tier application on various cloud providers

12. Mastering Ansible: Effectively automate configuration management and deployment challenges with Ansible 2.7, 3rd Edition

Authors James Freeman, and Jesse Keating will take you on a journey that will help you exploit the latest version’s advanced features to help you increase efficiency and accomplish complex orchestrations. The guide will help you understand how Ansible 2.7 works at a fundamental level and will also teach you to leverage its advanced capabilities.

Throughout this guide, you will wonderfully learn how to encrypt Ansible content at rest and decrypt data at runtime. Next, it will act as an ideal resource to help you master the advanced features and capabilities required to tackle complex automation challenges. Later, the guide will walk you through workflows, use cases, orchestrations, troubleshooting, and Ansible extensions.

In the end you will be able to:

• Gain an in-depth understanding of how Ansible works under the hood
• Fully automate Ansible playbook executions with encrypted data
• Access and manipulate variable data within playbooks
• Use blocks to perform failure recovery or cleanup
• Explore the Playbook debugger and the Ansible Console
• Troubleshoot unexpected behavior effectively
• Work with cloud infrastructure providers and container systems
• Develop custom modules, plugins, and dynamic inventory sources

Conclusion

DevOps and everything about automation have made IT such an innovative space. What took time to deploy and manage in the past can be done by just running one command and letting the playbooks work for you. We hope the resources provided above will boost your automation game as well as deepening your container tricks. Cheers guys. You might enjoy similar guides listed below. Check ’em out

• How To Install and Configure Ansible Tower on CentOS 7
• How to Install and use Packer on Ubuntu
• How to Setup Docker Private Registry on Ubuntu 
• How to setup 3 node Kubernetes Cluster on Ubuntu 18.04 with Weave Net CNI
• How to Install Podman on Ubuntu
• Install Docker and Docker Compose on Linux Mint 19
• Install and Use Docker Registry on Fedora
• How to run Docker Containers on Windows Server 2019
• How to Setup Semaphore Ansible Web UI on Ubuntu / Debian
• How to Install and Configure Ansible on RHEL