Let’s delve into the reasons why using Ansible is a great choice for CM and automation. Here are some compelling factors:
- Simplicity and user-friendliness: Ansible boasts an uncomplicated, human-readable YAML syntax that’s easy to grasp and employ, even for those with limited coding experience.
- Agentless approach: Ansible communicates through SSH or WinRM, eliminating the need to install agents on managed nodes. This reduces overhead and security concerns, a topic we’ll explore further when we discuss Ansible architecture.
- Idempotent operations: Ansible ensures the desired system state is achieved, even if configurations are applied repeatedly. This minimizes the risk of unintended changes.
- Broad adoption: With a thriving and active user community, Ansible offers extensive documentation, modules, and playbooks for various use cases.
- Cross-platform compatibility: Ansible can handle diverse environments, managing various operating systems, cloud providers, network devices, and infrastructure components with a single tool.
- Seamless integration: Ansible seamlessly integrates with other tools, including version control systems (VCSs), monitoring solutions, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Scalability: Ansible scales effortlessly to handle both small and large environments, catering to both enterprises and start-ups.
- Version control: Infrastructure configurations are stored in plain text files, simplifying change management, history tracking, and collaboration through Git or similar VCSs.
- Automation of routine tasks: Ansible automates repetitive chores such as software installations, configuration updates, and patch management, freeing up time for strategic tasks.
- Security and compliance: Implement security policies and compliance standards consistently across your infrastructure using Ansible’s Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and integrated security modules.
- Rollback and recovery: Ansible enables easy rollback to prior configurations in the case of issues, reducing downtime and minimizing the impact of changes.
- Modularity and reusability: Ansible encourages the creation of modular, reusable playbooks and roles, fostering an organized and efficient automation approach.
- Supportive community: Benefit from a robust Ansible community that offers support, documentation, and a repository of contributed roles and modules.
- Cost-effective: Ansible is open source and free to use, cutting down on licensing expenses compared to other automation tools.
- Orchestration and workflow automation: Beyond CM, Ansible can orchestrate intricate workflows, including application deployment and infrastructure provisioning.
- Immutable infrastructure: Ansible supports the concept of immutable infrastructure, where changes involve recreating components rather than modifying them in place. This leads to more predictable and dependable deployments.
- Real-time feedback: Ansible provides real-time feedback and reporting, simplifying the monitoring and troubleshooting of automation tasks.
These advantages establish Ansible as a popular choice for CM, automation, and orchestration across a wide spectrum of IT environments and industries.
Ansible has a simple architecture. It has a control node that takes care of managing multiple managed nodes. All you need is a control node server to install Ansible and the nodes to manage using the control node (also known as managed nodes). The managed nodes should allow an SSH connection from the Ansible control node—something like the following diagram:
Figure 9.1 – Ansible architecture
Now, let’s go ahead and see how we can install and set up the required configuration using Ansible.
Let’s look at how to install Ansible in the next section.
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