Introduction to Ansible

Introduction

• Ansible is an open-source automation tool that simplifies the management and configuration of IT infrastructure.
• It is widely used in the field of DevOps to automate repetitive tasks, streamline deployments, and ensure consistency across systems.
• With Ansible, you can define your infrastructure as code, allowing you to easily manage and provision servers, networks, and other resources.
• It follows a declarative approach, where you specify the desired state of your infrastructure, and Ansible takes care of bringing it to that state.

Key Features:

1. Agentless Architecture:
   • Unlike other configuration management tools, Ansible does not require any agents to be installed on the target systems.
   • Instead, it uses SSH or WinRM to connect to the remote hosts and execute tasks, making it lightweight and easy to set up.
2. YAML Configuration
   • Ansible uses a simple and human-readable language called YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) to define its playbooks.
3. Playbooks
   • Playbooks are the heart of Ansible, as they describe the desired state of your infrastructure and the tasks that need to be executed to achieve that state.
   • Playbooks can be used to perform a wide range of operations, such as installing packages, configuring services, and managing files.
4. Command-Line Tools
   • In addition to playbooks, Ansible provides a set of command-line tools that help you interact with your infrastructure.
   • These tools include ansible, which allows you to execute tasks on remote hosts, and ansible-playbook, which is used to run playbooks.
5. Inventories
   • Ansible also supports the concept of inventories, which are used to define the hosts and groups that Ansible can manage. = Inventories can be static, where you manually specify the hosts and groups in a file, or dynamic, where Ansible retrieves the inventory information from external sources like cloud providers or databases.

Building Ansible Inventories

• Sample Inventory
• Dynamic Inventory
• Patterns: Targeting Hosts and Groups
• Connection Methods and Details

Ansible CommandLine Tools

Ansible Playbooks