Security management

The last section in this chapter is about security management. If you tell your sysadmin that you want to introduce a new feature or a tool, one of the first questions they would ask you would be; "what security feature(s) are present with your tool?". We'll try to answer these questions from an Ansible perspective in this section. Let's look at them in greater detail.

Using Ansible vault

Ansible vault is an exciting feature of Ansible that was introduced in Ansible version 1.5. This allows you to have encrypted passwords as part of your source code. A recommended practice is to NOT have passwords (as well as any other sensitive information such as private keys, SSL certificates, and so on.) in plain text as part of your repository because anyone who checks out your repository can view your passwords. Ansible vault can help you to secure your confidential information by encrypting and decrypting them on your behalf.

Ansible vault supports an interactive mode in which it...