Ansible Tutorial and Resources

Ansible is an open-source IT automation software that automates the IT infrastructure. It creates an automated and consistent IT environment, making IT tasks much easier and faster. Such an environment is self-regulating and can manage all IT services without any additional agent. It sets up an automated environment for servers, OS, Applications,s and other IT services and configures them for better access. It also manages the deployment of any application on the system. Ansible uses to configure a variety of IT materials such as network devices, servers, database storage, cloud infrastructure, firewall, and any other virtual/physical platform. It automates the administrator’s task and allows fast access to various IT services. Ansible uses YAML language that describes system configuration to manage the IT services.

Why do we need to learn Ansible?

Ansible makes everyday IT tasks easier. IT tasks like storing the data, transferring the data, processing the data, dealing with bugs, installation, managing the security, etc. It is highly scalable. Big Software like Splunk Universal Forwarders is installed or updated with so much overhead and time-consuming. But Ansible makes it easy by configuring them and making everything automated. It removes the extra dependencies of the IT environment. Ansible just utilizes the playbooks, which are nothing but YAML files that contains the express configuration instructions. It helps to coordinate the processes which contain IT incidents, service requests, service changes, ad-hoc activities, etc.

Applications

Provisioning:- Ansible automates the provisioning of any IT infrastructure that can contain the application's life cycle. Ansible can provision network devices, virtualize host, cloud platform, and bare metals.

Configuration management:- Ansible helps to maintain the consistency of the application performance by updating every detail related to the application. It manages the configuration of the IT environment to install/update the application easily.

Security:- Security policies can be newly defined by ansible, which can be integrated with other automated processes. To improve the security of different nodes, one needs to configure security details once in the control machine, and this will integrate with all other nodes automatically.

Example

If we want to install a new version of Tomcat software on multiple, then manually updating the software on every machine is not a good idea. We can install the Tomcat software on one machine only, which will be adequate to install on every other machine. We can use playbooks and inventory of Ansible to do this task. We can mention the IP addresses of all the other machines in the inventory and can write instructions to install Tomcat in the playbook using YAML. This will install Tomcat on the entire machine by running this playbook on only one control machine.

Pre-requisites

In order to start learning ansible, you should have hands-on experience in using commands in the Linux shell.

Target Audience

This blog is for people who have knowledge of Python and SSH and want to get an idea of the use and application of Ansible.