DevOps Tooling

What are the key features and specific roles of Ansible?

February 25, 2022 Leave a Comment

Hi Learner, Lets know about Ansible, It is an open-source automation tool, which is used in IT tasks such as application deployment, configuration management and provisioning.

  • The Ansible tool was developed by Michael DeHaan.
  • Written in – Python, PowerShell, Shell, Ruby

Ansible – Supported Operating Systems

  • Linux, including RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, and others.
  • Windows and Windows Server
  • UNIX
  • OS X

What are the main benefits of Ansible?

  • It is fast and performs all functions over SSH and doesn’t require agent installation.
  • You can find Ansible to be a better fit in a larger or more homogeneous infrastructure.
  • The main advantage is Ansible can be run from the command line without the use of configuration files for simple tasks, such as making sure a service is running, or to trigger updates or reboots.
  • Ansible also has a collection of modules that can be used to manage various systems as well as cloud infrastructure such as Amazon EC2 and openstack.

Why Ansible?

  • It is free and Open Source.
  • It is Agentless. It doesn’t require any agent on client machines unlike other automation tool exists in the market (Puppet, Chef, Salt.). It uses SSH protocol to connect the servers. Ansible required Python to make the use of modules on client machines. Ansible also works with a system which doesn’t have python installed using the “raw” module.
  • It uses YAML language which is very easy to learn.
  • It Supported by Red Hat.

What are the specific roles of Ansible?

Ansible is something you would use if you had a number of hosts and you wanted them to be configuration driven. For instance if you had a dozen types of servers with different roles, and you wanted each host within a specific role to be identical. Maybe all hosts would all have the same kernel patch, but different packages based on the role.

A configuration management tool lets you specify rules by which you manage your servers, and makes large scale management simple and consistent. It has many features around pushing software and changes out to hosts, examples would be making sure packages are installed and doing diffs on files it wants to modify before it applies changes.

Is Ansible free for commercial use?

Absolutely ansible free for commercial use, It can be used for commercial purpose without any charges. They have a paid offering known as Ansible tower which provides a neat dashboard and a few bells and whistles.

Key Features of Ansible:

  1. Models the IT infrastructure around the systems interrelating with each other, thus ensuring faster end results.
  2. Module library can reside on any system, without the requirement of any server, daemons or databases.
  3. No additional setup required, so once you have the instance ready you can work on it straight away.
  4. Easier and faster to deploy as it doesn’t rely on agents or additional custom security infrastructure.
  5. Uses a very simple language structure called playbooks. Playbooks are almost similar to the plain English language for describing automation jobs.
  6. Ansible has the flexibility to allow user-made modules that can be written in any programming language such as Ruby, Python. It also allows adding new server side behaviors extending Ansible’s connection types through Python APIs.

If you are planning to learn Ansible certification then I would suggest you DevOpsSchool.com. DevOpsSchool is one of the Top Institute for “Ansible training and certification program” where we offer you both in online and offline classroom mode by top experts/trainers.

If you are planning to learn Ansible free course then you can watch below tutorial

Rajesh Kumar
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