What is Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source automation tool, or platform, used for IT tasks such as Provisioning, Configuration Management, Application Deployment, Continuous Delivery, Security Automation, and Orchestration. Automation is crucial these days, with IT environments that are too complex and often need to scale too quickly for system administrators and developers to keep up if they have to do everything manually. Automation simplifies complex tasks, not just making developers’ jobs more manageable but allowing them to focus attention on other tasks that add value to an organization. In other words, it frees up time and increases efficiency.

Ansible can automate IT environments whether they are hosted on traditional bare metal servers, virtualization platforms, or in the cloud. It can also automate the configuration of a wide range of systems and devices such as databases, storage devices, networks, firewalls, and many others. The best part is that you don’t even need to know the commands used to accomplish a particular task. You just need to specify what state you want the system to be in and Ansible will take care of it. An example ensures that your web servers are running the latest version.

Ansible is built on several core components that allow for flexibility and scalability. Modules are like small programs that Ansible pushes out from a control machine to all the nodes or remote hosts. Ansible comes with a number of its plugins. Plugins are extra pieces of code that augment functionality but you can write your own as well. Once you register the inventory, you can assign variables to any of the hosts using a simple text file. You can also pull inventory from sources from dynamic locations including the cloud. Playbooks are really at the heart of what makes Ansible so popular because they describe the tasks to be done quickly and without the need for the user to know or remember any particular syntax. That flexibility and scalability have led Ansible to be named a leader in “The Forrester Wave” for Infrastructure Automation Platforms. “Red Hat’s solution is best for customers that want a holistic infrastructure automation solution and could stand to rationalize a few unneeded tools out of their portfolios.” – The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure Automation Platforms