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What is Ansible?
Ansible is an open-source platform used for automation and
for various operations such as configuration management, application
deployment, task automation, and IT orchestration. Ansible is easy to set up,
and it is efficient, reliable, and powerful. It runs on Linux, Mac, or BSD.
Apart from the free version, it has an enterprise edition called Ansible Tower.
Important Terms in
Ansible:
· Controller Machine: This is where Ansible gets
installed. The controller machine helps in enabling provisioning on servers we
manage.
· Inventory: This is basically an initializing
file that contains information about the servers that we are managing.
· Playbook: It is an organized unit of
scripts defining an automated work for the configuration management of our
server.
· Task: A
task block defines a single procedure to be executed on the server like
installing packages.
Ansible Workflow:
As we discussed
above, when services increase, sysadmins will provision more servers to do
configuration management. They need not do
it manually anymore but install Ansible on the master node where they need to
write the code into the Ansible playbook to describe the
setup, installation process, and the configuration required for these servers.
Ansible Architecture:
From
the diagram below it is clear that Ansible Orchestration Engine interacts with
a user who is writing the Ansible playbook to execute Ansible Orchestration
Engine, along with interacting with the services of the public/private cloud
and configuration management database.
Ansible connects
the nodes and pushes out small ‘Ansible Modules.’ Modules are executed by
Ansible and then get removed when finished. These modules can reside on any
machine; no servers or daemons or databases are required here. We can work with
the text editor of our choice or a terminal and a version control system to
keep track of the changes made in our content.
Plugins:
A plugin is a
piece of code that expands the core functionality of Ansible. There are plenty
of handy plugins, and we can write our own plugins as well.
Inventory:
We already
discussed this in the Ansible Terminologies section. An inventory is a list of
hosts/nodes, having IP addresses, servers, databases, etc., which need to be
managed.
Playbooks:
As discussed
earlier, we write our code in a playbook. It is simple and written in the YAML
format and basically describes tasks that are supposed to be executed through
Ansible. We can launch tasks synchronously or asynchronously with playbooks.
APIs:
Ansible APIs work
as transport for cloud services, either public or private.
Hosts:
Hosts are
basically, the node systems in the Ansible architecture getting automated by
Ansible only. They can be any type of machine such as Windows, Red Hat, Linux,
etc.
Contact us at +91-9989971070/online@visualpath.in
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