Hey Techies…👋
In this blog, we’re going to discuss a general introduction to Ansible.
Ansible, a powerful automation tool which plays a pivotal role in making transformation in terms of enhancing efficiency ,reducing human errors, scalability ,configuration management ,DevOps integration ,security and compliance and cost savings and so on.
Ansible is an open-source configuration management tool that allows you to automate deployments, provisioning, applications and orchestration. We can use it to automatically deploy applications, update our servers and even provision cloud instances!
Ansible is mainly used in configuration management, where we have to configure hundreds and thousands of systems with similar configurations.
WHAT IS ANSIBLE AUTOMATION?
- Red Hat is the sponsor of the open source Ansible project. Additionally, it’s an easily understood automation language that Ansible Playbooks use to precisely define IT application environments.
- Ansible Engine is a supported product built from the Ansible community project.
- Ansible Tower is an enterprise framework for controlling, securing, managing and extending your Ansible automation (community or engine) with a UI and RESTful API.
Why Ansible?
Let’s start by discussing the issues we had before using Ansible.
If you’re a systems engineer or System administrator, you most likely perform a number of repetitive tasks on a daily basis in your environment. These tasks may include creating and sizing new hosts or virtual machines, applying configurations, patching hundreds of servers, migrating, deploying applications, or even conducting security and compliance audits.
These incredibly repetitive activities require hundreds of commands to be executed on hundreds of distinct servers while keeping the proper order of events throughout, including system reboots and other occurrences.
Some people write scripts to automate these activities, but doing so takes coding expertise, ongoing script maintenance, and a significant amount of initial development work.
Here’s the fix for the above-mentioned issues: use Ansible.
The assigned/connected systems will all be setup when we write and execute a script once. We may even provide an alternative configuration for an alternative set of computers.
The following points make it very evident why Ansible is using:
- Cloud provisioning
- Configuration Management
- Intra-service Orchestration
- Continuous Delivery
- Application Deployment
Advantages of Ansible
Concepts of Ansible
Let’s discuss some of the concepts using in Ansible and their functionalities:
▪️Control Node
▪️Target Node
▪️Inventory
▪️Collections
▪️Playbooks
▪️Plays
▪️Roles
▪️Tasks
▪️Handlers
▪️Modules🎯Control Node
This is the cluster’s primary machine, on which Ansible is installed, and from which all code is executed. It also contains data related to the managed nodes.
🎯Target Node /Host
These are the systems where software configuration or deployment has to be performed. Every system is connected to the controller node and is set up in accordance with how the controller node executes code.
🎯Inventory
All of the target nodes’ information, including their IP address and login credentials, is kept in this file. We can even put the systems together in a host group.
🎯Collections
A format in which Ansible content is distributed that can contain playbooks, roles, modules, and plugins.
🎯Playbooks
This file contains all of the code, which is written in YAML format. We can write the configuration command for each host group in this file.
🎯Plays
A play is the execution of a playbook. We are able to write as many plays in a single playbook as we want.
🎯Roles
Roles are used to simplify Ansible playbooks which means we can break a complex Ansible playbook into independent and reusable roles that are used to automatically load certain var_files, tasks, and handlers as per predefined file structure.
🎯Tasks
A task is the smallest unit of action we can automate using an Ansible playbook which contains a series of tasks that serve a goal, such as to set up a web server, or to deploy an application to remote environments.
🎯Handlers
A special form of task that only run when ‘notified’ using the notify directive. Handlers are usually used to start, restart, reload and stop services on target nodes only when there is a change in the state of the task.
🎯Modules
The binary files or code that Ansible copies to each managed node and runs when needed to complete the actions specified in each task. Every module serves a specific purpose, such as controlling VLAN interfaces on certain types of network devices or administering users on a specific type of database.
💹On the upcoming day, our focus will be on the architecture and functioning of Ansible.
✅Beforehand, make sure you have a solid grasp of the basic introduction to Ansible.
⭐⭐⭐ Enjoy your learning….!!! ⭐⭐⭐
