What Is Ansible and How Do You Use It?
IT professionals have to manage systems across multiple platforms. They often have to do things manually, taking up time and leaving room for errors. Thankfully, there are automation tools like Ansible. This post will go over what Ansible is, how it works, and how you can learn to use the platform.
Want a quick Ansible guide? Check out this video.
What Is Ansible?
Ansible is an open-source management tool that automates apps and IT infrastructure. It allows IT professionals to automate several processes that they would otherwise do manually.
It works great with your existing tools and doesn’t require any added servers, daemons, or databases to operate. Ansible doesn’t have any additional security infrastructure, making it easy to deploy.
How is Ansible Used?
You can use Ansible to automate almost anything an IT professional does consistently and reliably. These repetitive and recurring tasks may include:
- Configuration management
- Cloud provisioning
- Application deployment
- Intra-service orchestration
- Software Installation
- Security and compliance improvement
- Sharing automation across entire organizations
- Other tasks performed on a daily or weekly basis
By automating these tasks, systems administrators can save time and reduce errors, allowing them to focus on other critical tasks and scale their IT infrastructure.
How Does Ansible Work?
Unlike other management systems, Ansible uses multi-tier deployments. In other words, it describes how all of your systems inter-relate as opposed to managing one system at a time.
Ansible works by connecting to the nodes in your network (computers, servers, clients, etc.) and delivering instructions to them. The instructions come from small programs called “Ansible modules” and describe the desired state of the node.
The modules are usually executed over SSH. After their execution, Ansible removes the modules from the node.
What Is Ansible Tower?
Ansible Tower is the framework for controlling, securing, managing, and extending your Ansible automation. It’s a web-based hub that makes it easy for IT teams to maintain automation tasks.
Tower lets you delegate automation and control permissions to users within your organization. It also helps standardize how automation are deployed and managed. Tower can also help you manage inventory, track changes, and sync with cloud sources.
While Tower was the standard framework for some time, it’s been replaced by the automation controller in Ansible Automation Platform 2, which you can access directly from Ansible’s website.
How Can You Learn Ansible?
Thankfully, Ansible uses a simple language called YAML, making learning easy. YAML approaches plain English and is easily readable for most people.
You can learn Ansible through a variety of online classes. Start by checking out these KodeKloud courses:
Learn Ansible with the Best Online Courses from KodeKloud
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