Of recently there has been a rising demand to use Ansible in the corporate offices and many of the people are confused how Ansible can be helpful. If you are one of them who had been curious to know the functions of Ansible then this article is the answer for you. Read on to know more.
What Is Ansible?
More precisely Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine. It enables configuration management, cloud provisioning, intra service orchestration, application deployment, etc. In fact, it is responsible to look after several needs of an IT company. Some things that you should know about Ansible are as follows:
Gather Information about the Hosts
Ansible invokes the setup (special) module before the execution of its first task. This module connects to the host to gather information of every type. This includes tracing the IP address, CPU architecture, disk space, available memory and others. This is a quick solution if you want to gather information about the host servers.
Passing Parameters To Roles
To organize your playbooks creating roles is important. The folders are used to store the default values. They also enable overwriting the default values by passing a different parameter to the roles.
Runs A Task Only Once
There might be sometimes that you want to run a task, but not more than once. Ansible can help at this moment even if there are several numbers of hosts. Precisely the run_once parameter is the command that realizes the function.
Running Things in “Dry Run” Mode
In Ansible, it is possible to run a playbook in the dry run mode. While on the mode Ansible will not enable any changes to the host. It would simply report the changes that the playbook might have made if the flag was not available. But this step can restrict work that uses conditional steps.
Runs Step-By-Step
Running all tasks of the playbook might not want to run all the tasks at once. With Ansible you have the choice to choose which tasks you want to run. This is especially helpful in tasting a new playbook. The “step” flag enables this criterion by giving you the option to select or to skip running the task.
Handlers Are Special Types of Tasks
Tasks under handlers have unique names. They can be executed when they are notified by some other task. They are good for restarting or rebooting a system. The notified handlers are executed one after another and not all at once.
Has a Notification Module
If you want to automate the blue-green deployment or want to run playbooks to provision newer instances then the notification modules of Ansible will become important for your use. There are modules for twillio, notificating irc, jabber, hipchat, and many others.
Helps Speeding Up
Enable pipelining and fact catching can help make programs to run faster. But in order to add them you have to be much careful.
Ansible is regarded as a deployment tool for working in an agent less manner performing the operations on a node over SSH. So, using them for your office can be a helpful means to stay ahead of the crowd.
