Ansible Introduction

You have hundreds and thousands of online documentation and wiki pages for learning Ansible , and this is our attempt to cover Ansible in a simple and beginner level approach.

See all parts of Automation with Ansible Guides here

What is Ansible

Ansible is a simple and awesome IT automation engine by which you can automates your  IT environment for provisioning, configuration management, application and patch deployment, orchestration etc.

Ansible is,

• Simple – commands and playbooks are human readable and easy to exchange between teams; they don’t need special skills to read it.
• Powerful – you can manage application/patch/server deployment, configuration, workflow automation or appliances (ESX hosts, Storage boxes or network devices).
• Agentless – Ansible does not need any agent to be running on the managed hosts , instead it connect to the hosts using OpenSSH or WinRM .

How Ansible Works

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Ansible Concept and Architecture

Controlnode – Ansible is installed and run from the controlnode and will contain copies of your project file including ansible playbooks. It can be a workstation or a dedicated server in the environment.

Managed Hosts – these are listed servers or nodes in the inventory – defined as static or via dynamic inventory scripts – on which Ansible commands or playbook tasks need to be executed.

Playbook – Plays are ordered set of tasks to execute against host selections from your inventory. A playbook is a file containing one or more plays.

Tasks – Task run a module with arguments to accomplish the required state or action.

Tasks → Plays → Playbook

Ansible Tower – is an enterprise framework by Redhat , to manage, control and secure your ansible environment.

Use Cases

• Provisioning
• Configuration Management
• App Deployment
• Continuous Delivery
• Security & Compliance
• Orchestration

Let’s learn about Ansible Installation in next part.

See all parts of Automation with Ansible Guides here