EDUCBA

EDUCBA

MENUMENU
  • Free Tutorials
  • Free Courses
  • Certification Courses
  • 600+ Courses All in One Bundle
  • Login

What is Ansible?

By Priya PedamkarPriya Pedamkar

Home » Software Development » Software Development Tutorials » Ansible Tutorial » What is Ansible?

What is Ansible?

Introduction to Ansible

Ansible is an open source automation framework (or platform) used for IT tasks such as the deployment of software, configuration management, orchestration of infra services and supply. Automation is crucial today, with overly complex IT environments that often need to be scale-up too quickly for system managers and designers to keep abreast of everything manually. The automation simplifies complex tasks, allowing developers to concentrate on other tasks that add value to an organization, and not just make developer jobs better managed.

Understanding

It is simple, powerful and agentless. The biggest differentiator between ansible and other tools lies in the architecture, it works on “Push” model i.e. no additional software is required to be installed in the server. By default it manages remote connections over SSH (Linux & Unix) or WinRM (windows).

Start Your Free Software Development Course

Web development, programming languages, Software testing & others

Below is this architecture diagram of AnsibleAnsible architecture

Let’s see the functionality of the individual components in detail.

Ansible automation engine encompasses an Inventory, API, modules, and plugins.

Ansible Playbook: It leverages the playbook for automation and orchestration of IT infrastructure. This playbook consists of automation task that serves as an input to the ansible automation engine which describes how a particular piece of automation will work.

This playbook consists of a series of “play” which defines the automation task across a set of hosts known as “Inventory”. Each ‘play’ consists of multiple tasks that can serve one or more host present in the inventory. All these tasks made a call to an Ansible module, which is a small piece of code that performs a specific task.

Popular Course in this category
All in One Software Development Bundle (600+ Courses, 50+ projects)600+ Online Courses | 3000+ Hours | Verifiable Certificates | Lifetime Access
4.6 (3,144 ratings)
Course Price

View Course

Related Courses
Linux Training Program (16 Courses, 3+ Projects)Kali Linux Training (3 Courses, 3+ Projects)Red Hat Linux Training Program (4 Courses, 1+ Projects)

A typical example of a task could be installing any software or placing a configuration file in the server. A more complex task could be spinning up the entire Cloud Formation infrastructure in Amazon EC2.

It comes with hundreds of module ranging from managing network devices, simple configuration management, to modules for maintaining infrastructure on every cloud provider.

These modules are designed in such a way that it first checks whether the task needs to be executed or not, for instance, if an ansible task is to start a Tomcat server then the task will only get executed if it is not running already. This phenomenon is termed as “Idempotency” which allows executing configuration repeatedly without any mayhem.

These playbook tasks can also be reused, these reusable units are called “Role”. These roles can be easily leveraged to perform redundant tasks such as to apply common server configuration across development, UAT and production server.

Note: you don’t have to write these roles from scratch, Ansible Galaxy community site contains thousand of roles that you can use and customize as per your needs.

What can you do with Ansible?

With this, you can automate the below-mentioned tasks. let’s see some particle example to understand it in an easy way.

Example of ansible

Let’s assume you have a java web application that needs to be deployed in multiple server i.e. dev, UAT and prod. In order to deploy the war file, first, you need to set up the web server and database server in all the machine. Also, the same SQL scripts need to run in all the database to set up the database. Now it doesn’t make sense to perform this redundant task manually.

With this all you need to do is to write simple tasks in playbook and Ansible will perform these redundant tasks for you.

Required Skills

Unlike puppet & chef (automation tool like ansible) which requires the knowledge of ruby, with ansible you don’t need to learn any complicated programming language. Ansible uses YAML which is high level human readable language that can be easily understood by IT Admin. Also, most of the common tasks are available in the form if playbook in the Ansible Galaxy Community which you can extend as per your requirement.

Why should we use Ansible?

So far we have talked about what Ansible is capable of. Now let’s see why we should make use of Ansible in our projects.

  1. Using this you can cut down certain processes from hours to minutes.
  2. It eliminates repetitive tasks
  3. It saves time and improves productivity.
  4. Fewer mistakes and error.
  5. Increase accountability and compliance.

Who is the right audience for learning these technologies?

You must be thinking that this technology is related with the IT Infrastructure and Maintenance which usually taken care by the IT Admin or the deployment team and you being a developer doesn’t need to understand this but let me break this stereotype. As you know that in DevOps development and operations work is integrated, it provides a stable environment for both development and operations. Thus it is important that a developer must understand the task written in the playbooks and if there is any change in the development environment he/she should be capable to make changes in the playbook for other environments accordingly for a smooth orchestration of the application lifecycle.

How this technology will help you in career growth?

It is must-have technology in your resume. Nowadays, every other company is trying to automate all the processes they can to increase the overall productivity and efficiency of the application and resources. Enterprise applications which typically deployed in different servers across the globe require constant server configuration and management which requires a good amount of time and efforts. If you have very good knowledge of automation tool like Ansible and able to write playbook to automate this redundant task, this will definitely set you apart and helps you in your career growth.

Conclusion

After reading this article you must have got a clear understanding of what Ansible is, what ansible is capable of and how can you improve the overall efficiency and productivity in your project by implementing Ansible. If you want to go deep in this topic you can check the white paper and sample playbooks available at the official Red Hat Ansible website.

Recommended Articles

This has been a guide to What is Ansible. Here we discuss the working of Ansible and also how and where it can help in career growth. You can also go through our other suggested articles to learn more –

  1. Ansible Commands
  2. What Is Python?
  3. What Is Apache
  4. Ansible Versions

All in One Software Development Bundle (600+ Courses, 50+ projects)

600+ Online Courses

3000+ Hours

Verifiable Certificates

Lifetime Access

Learn More

2 Shares
Share
Tweet
Share
Primary Sidebar
Ansible Tutorial
  • Ansible Basics
    • What is Ansible
    • Is Ansible free
    • How to Install Ansible
    • Ansible Versions
    • Ansible Architecture
    • Ansible Commands
    • Ansible ad-hoc Commands
    • Ansible Playbooks
    • Ansible Roles
    • Ansible Tags
    • Ansible Ping
    • Ansible Apt
    • Ansible Facts
    • Ansible Tower
    • Ansible Galaxy
    • Ansible Handlers
    • Ansible Loop
    • Ansible Block
    • Ansible Conditional
    • Ansible YAML
    • Ansible Debug
    • Ansible Synchronize
    • Ansible Template
    • Ansible group_vars
    • Ansible Lookup
    • Ansible File Module
    • Ansible Yum Module
    • Ansible Shell Module
    • Ansible lineinfile
    • Ansible Service Module
    • Ansible User Module
    • Ansible Windows Modules
    • ansible-doc
    • Ansible Filters
    • Ansible Add User to Group
    • Ansible Register
    • Ansible Set Fact
    • Ansible Hosts File
    • Ansible add_host
    • Ansible Collections
    • Ansible with_items
    • Ansible Replace Line in File
    • Ansible inventory_hostname
    • Ansible Dynamic Inventory
    • Ansible local_action
    • Ansible Firewalld
    • Ansible Unarchive
    • Ansible Sudo
    • Ansible Create Directory
    • Ansible Reboot
    • Ansible wait_for
    • Ansible run_once
    • Ansible Authorized_key
    • Ansible Interview Questions

Related Courses

Linux Training Course

Kali Linux Training

Red Hat Training Course

Footer
About Us
  • Blog
  • Who is EDUCBA?
  • Sign Up
  • Corporate Training
  • Certificate from Top Institutions
  • Contact Us
  • Verifiable Certificate
  • Reviews
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  •  
Apps
  • iPhone & iPad
  • Android
Resources
  • Free Courses
  • Java Tutorials
  • Python Tutorials
  • All Tutorials
Certification Courses
  • All Courses
  • Software Development Course - All in One Bundle
  • Become a Python Developer
  • Java Course
  • Become a Selenium Automation Tester
  • Become an IoT Developer
  • ASP.NET Course
  • VB.NET Course
  • PHP Course

© 2020 - EDUCBA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THE CERTIFICATION NAMES ARE THE TRADEMARKS OF THEIR RESPECTIVE OWNERS.

EDUCBA Login

Forgot Password?

EDUCBA
Free Software Development Course

Web development, programming languages, Software testing & others

*Please provide your correct email id. Login details for this Free course will be emailed to you
Book Your One Instructor : One Learner Free Class

Let’s Get Started

This website or its third-party tools use cookies, which are necessary to its functioning and required to achieve the purposes illustrated in the cookie policy. By closing this banner, scrolling this page, clicking a link or continuing to browse otherwise, you agree to our Privacy Policy

EDUCBA

*Please provide your correct email id. Login details for this Free course will be emailed to you
EDUCBA
Free Software Development Course

Web development, programming languages, Software testing & others

*Please provide your correct email id. Login details for this Free course will be emailed to you

Special Offer - All in One Software Development Bundle (600+ Courses, 50+ projects) Learn More