What is Ansible?

IT Industry is always looking for better solutions when it comes to finding a better technology. Ansible seems to have answered many people’s problems. Aimed to remove toiling from the user’s work life whilst intensely improving the volume of a task to be changed in size or scale, steadiness, and dependability of an IT atmosphere, Ansible is an open-source IT automation engine. Given its growing reputation, it is a must to look into the finer details of Ansible. Here is an in-depth analysis.

The talk about Ansible has been about its abilities to automate. Ansible can be used to automate three kinds of responsibilities:

  • Provisioning: Ansible helps in setting up the several servers that can be needed in an infrastructure.
  • Management of Configuration: It helps in changing the disposition of either an application (apk files) or OS (Operating System) or device. It has the ability to start and stop services. It can also install or update apps. Ansible also applies security policies along with running a vast range of other configuration tasks.
  • Application disposition: By running automation in the placement of internally created apps to the production structures, DevOps is made a lot easier.

Ansible a perfect solution

Ansible automates IT environments. Being hosted on old-style plain metal servers or on virtualization stages or being in the cloud does not matter. Ansible has the capacity to automate the configuration of a vast variety of systems and machines. The likes of databases, firewalls, storage devices, etc. are all included.

Ansible, better than its competitors?

In this day and age, the options of IT automation tools are plenty. When there are developed ones like Puppet and Chef already available, the market may seem a bit rough for Ansible. That was the overall prediction but that has not been the case at all. Ansible’s simplistic nature has made it differentiate itself from customers. Michael DeHaan is the originator of Ansible. He is a highly experienced man in the field of configuration management tools. That gave him a huge bonus when he was developing Ansible because he really made the process of using automation tools simpler. His target was to create a tool that would be easy to remember even when not used for a very long time. That has indeed become Ansible’s unique quality.

By the usage of YAML, a meek configuration language, Ansible was made to be a lot easier to use compared to its direct market rivals Puppet and Chef, both of which use the programming language Ruby, something way more complicated. This has made Ansible particularly attractive to system administrators. DeHaan also made Ansible’s deployment a lot less complex by making it agentless – which means that Ansible does not require the installation of an agent on every system that needs to be managed as is the case with Puppet and Chef. Ansible’s needs for running smoothly are the availability of SSH, Python on Linux servers and PowerShell on Windows servers.

Ansible Playbooks

Playbooks are easy to write and preserve. Most operators become fruitful with Ansible after spending as little as a few hours. The tools used by Ansible are the same tools anyone has already used on a daily basis. Playbooks are written in a normal dialect so they are very simple to change and manage.

Ansible is a better fit for users who generally work on Linux systems. They will also suit those better who prefer using SSH all the time. Ansible is the best solution for configuration management accessible. It’s planned to be negligible in failure. It is naturally reliable, protected, and delivers on a consistent basis. Most important is that demands a low level of understanding compared to its competitors. Its simplicity makes it stand out.

Published by

Coss India

Coss India

Founded in 2004, COSS is an ISO 9001:2008 certified a global IT training and company.

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