Ansible Introduction

Ansible-1

Ansible is used to automate the infrastructer in the organization.It is one of the major tool among the devops tools because it makes tedious tasks so simple.Using Ansible we can communicate 100s of servers very easy using secure shell(SSH).

You might wonder how it work?It's simple It work like client-server architecture.Now small organizations to large enterprises using Ansible as their primary configuration management tool in their environment.It communicates with different servers using SSH.

Ansible is purely written in python.It makes Ansible simple and smart. Ansible scripts are known as playbooks.These playbooks contains set of tasks.

It’s simplicity forces everyone to use Ansible as configuration management tool.

 It is a Configuration Management Tool, Provisioning Tool, Orchestration Tool.Ansible uses YAML format. It uses Declarative language. Ansible scripts are called playbooks. These playbooks are saved with extension “playbookname.yml”.Ansible uses two tier architecture .It contains Controller Machines and Managed Machine.

Ansible software is installed on Controller Machine and all the playbooks will be written on controller machine. These playbooks will be pushed to run on Managed Machines. So its called Push based method.

Ansible uses SSH(Secure Shell) to communicate with controller machine.Ansible is purely dependent on Python. To run ansible on controller machine we must have python pre installed. To work with managed machines also managed machines also requires python installed. Ansible playbooks are reusable means we can write playbook once and we can use it several times when we require.

Ansible playbooks are idempotent means. Once we execute a playbook on particular server it will executes the playbook tasks. If run the same playbook on same server it does’t run the same tasks again.it saves time.it is known as idempotency.

Ansible is having rich set of modules. which makes writing playbooks simple.These modules are written in Python.Ansible follows Purely in order execution.To work with ansible controller machine must be a linux based system. Managed machine may be linux, Mac, Windows(For windows it should have power shell 3.0 to be installed, Windows Remote service should be enabled,Python module Winrm to be installed ). Ansible contains two important files those are inventory file(It contains hosts information), ansible.cfg file(This is main configuration file for ansible).

You can follow official documentation from ansible by clicking the below link.

Ansible Documentation

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Devops Desk Team