What is Ansible?

Ansible is a practical and easy IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT tasks and processes(Red Hat Ansible, n.d.).

Why use Ansible?

• Ansible is Simple
  • Human readable automation
  • No special coding skills needed
  • Tasks executed in order
  • Usable by every team
  • Get productive quickly
• Ansible is agentless
  • saves time on deployment or migration
  • Agentless architecture
  • uses OpenSSH & WinRM
  • No agents to exploit or update
  • Get started immediately
  • More efficient & more secure
• Ansible uses YAML
  • App deployment
  • Configuration management
  • workflow orchestration
  • Network automation
  • Orchestrate the app lifecycle

How does Ansible Work?

• Install Ansible
• Identify your infrastructure pain points
• Utilize human-readable YAML
• Create playbooks to ensure applications are configured and described adequately
  • Playbooks are Ansible’s configuration, deployment and orchestration language.
  • Tasks are executed sequentially by invoking Ansible modules through playbooks written in YAML
  • Modules are tools in the toolkit that are written in programming languages such as Python, extending Ansible simplicity to the entire stack.
  • Plugins are gears in the engine that are supported by the core engine and add adaptability for various use cases and platforms
  • Inventories are lists of systems, hosts, groups, inventory-specific data (variables) or static/dynamic sources in your infrastructures that automation is executed against
  • Can be on-premise or cloud-hosted platforms
  • Use version control for tracking changes in playbooks configurations
  • Monitor and capture server inventories, details, logs,
• Orchestration with other tools such as Puppet, Jenkins, SALT, etc. to homogenize existing environments by leveraging current toolsets and update mechanisms.

Sample Ad-Hoc Ansible Commands

# check all my inventory hosts are ready to be managed by Ansible
> ansible all -m ping

# run the uptime command on all hosts in the web group
> ansible web -m command -a "uptime"

# collect and display the discovered setup for the localhost
> ansible localhost -m setup 

References:

Red Hat Ansible. (n.d.). How Ansible Works. http://www.ansible.com/overview/how-ansible-works

Red Hat Ansible Automation (2021). Getting Started with Ansible [Video]. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRoLVm6nTCU&ab_channel=RedHatAnsibleAutomation