arensb reviewed Mastering Ansible by Jesse Keating
Review of 'Mastering Ansible' on 'Storygraph'
3 stars
Overall, a good introduction to Ansible. If you're thinking of using Ansible, or if you've tinkered with it and need to get your head around it, read this.
On the down side, this book desperately needs a copy editor, especially in the last third, to clean up sentences like
However, during an upgrade, it may be desirable to delay all service restarts until every service is ready to minimize interruptions.
The author also has a tendency to use abstract, toy problems to illustrate the concepts he's explaining. For instance, in a section on running tasks only once across a group of hosts, he presents an Ansible playbook that prints "I am groot" once (saving this to the "groot" register), and then, on the last host, prints the value of the "groot" register.
Toy problems are useful because they present a clear, if simplified, view of the problem, without a lot …
Overall, a good introduction to Ansible. If you're thinking of using Ansible, or if you've tinkered with it and need to get your head around it, read this.
On the down side, this book desperately needs a copy editor, especially in the last third, to clean up sentences like
However, during an upgrade, it may be desirable to delay all service restarts until every service is ready to minimize interruptions.
The author also has a tendency to use abstract, toy problems to illustrate the concepts he's explaining. For instance, in a section on running tasks only once across a group of hosts, he presents an Ansible playbook that prints "I am groot" once (saving this to the "groot" register), and then, on the last host, prints the value of the "groot" register.
Toy problems are useful because they present a clear, if simplified, view of the problem, without a lot of confounding facts getting in the way. But I find it hard to see how examples like the one above correspond to a real-world installation, or how to build on it to have a task run only once.