What is Ansible?
Ansible is a configuration tool that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.
Ansible works on agentless architecture and this means that to automate the nodes without any software to be initially installed in the other nodes (other than SSH).
Ansible majorly depends on SSH for each and every task to be executed. With the help of SSH key authentication, we can make secure authentication.
Ansible is also easy to learn with the Simple YAML syntax and clean documentation provided by Red Hat.
System Automation
Although ansible works well with Linux based Operating system as controller nodes, Ansible can be used to automate many other Operating systems like:
- Windows
- OSX
- UNIX and may others
The abundant modules provided by ansible makes it universal to use
Since Ansible is Idempotent, the efficiency of automation is high with the built-in intelligence in the tool
Things like setting up a reverse proxy server like Haproxy server is a small task but yet Automation will increase the speed of production by many times
when we use ansible, we can create multiple resources like web servers and launch Web Apps by scaling the number of servers by integrating with container technologies allowing us to create microservices too.
Cloud Infrastructure
Nowadays, cloud instances and other Cloud services are very famous to use and Cloud Computing plays a significant role in Automation because of the high availability services and effectively Low-cost plans.
Although we have cloud services like EKS which makes it easier to set up Kubernetes, setting Kubernetes is a laborious task to be done manually. This stuff can be automated using Ansible with it's builtin or community modules created.
Ansible with the help of the Boto library can be used to automate the provisioning of AWS cloud instances like EC2 and other AWS services.
Virtualization
Virtualization plays an important role in automation with the infrastructure that it can provide us by allowing multiple Operating systems to run parallel to another and helps us achieve virtual scaling.
But Virtualization is an advance concept and automating it will decrease the cost of human input for each and every time we need to work on Virtualization.
Ansible has the modules that can integrate with tools like:
- VMware
- Vagrant
- Red Hat Virtualization (RHV)
- XenServer
Ansible also can be used in Networking automation too.
Finally, Ansible automation has revolutionised the technologies and lead to a more automated and efficient Infrastructure building for many Industries and also made the automation simple with the software's ease of use.
I would like to thank Vimal Daga sir for providing this Great Knowledge and Hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful.