Ansible

Ansible is a suite of software tools that enables infrastructure as code. It is open-source and the suite includes software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment functionality.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is the IT automation technology that anyone can use

Ansible Automation Platform has grown over the past years to provide powerful automation solutions that work for operators, administrators and IT decision makers across a variety of technology domains.

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation system. It handles configuration management, application deployment, cloud provisioning, ad-hoc task execution, network automation, and multi-node orchestration. Ansible makes complex changes like zero-downtime rolling updates with load balancers easy.

Design Principles

• Have an extremely simple setup process with a minimal learning curve.
• Manage machines quickly and in parallel.
• Avoid custom-agents and additional open ports, be agentless by leveraging the existing SSH daemon.
• Describe infrastructure in a language that is both machine and human friendly.
• Focus on security and easy auditability/review/rewriting of content.
• Manage new remote machines instantly, without bootstrapping any software.
• Allow module development in any dynamic language, not just Python.
• Be usable as non-root.
• Be the easiest IT automation system to use, ever.

Is Ansible a programming language?

Ansible is a system of configuration management written in Python programming language which uses a declarative markup language to describe configurations. It’s used for automation of configuration and OS setup. Ansible is often used to manage Linux-nodes, but Windows is also supported.

Ansible uses YAML syntax for expressing Ansible playbooks. This chapter provides an overview of YAML. Ansible uses YAML because it is very easy for humans to understand, read and write when compared to other data formats like XML and JSON.

Every YAML file optionally starts with “ — -” and ends with “…”.

Understanding YAML

In this section, we will learn the different ways in which the YAML data is represented.

key-value pair

YAML uses simple key-value pair to represent the data. The dictionary is represented in key: value pair.

Note − There should be space between : and value.

Example: A student record

--- #Optional YAML start syntax
james:
name: james john
rollNo: 34
div: B
sex: male
… #Optional YAML end syntax

Some common words related to Ansible.

Service/Server − A process on the machine that provides the service.

Machine − A physical server, vm(virtual machine) or a container.

Target machine − A machine we are about to configure with Ansible.

Task − An action(run this, delete that) etc managed by Ansible.

Playbook − The yml file where Ansible commands are written and yml is executed on a machine.