Ansible

What Is Ansible ?

Ansible is an open source IT Configuration Management, Deployment & Orchestration tool. It aims to provide large productivity gains to a wide variety of automation challenges. This tool is very simple to use yet powerful enough to automate complex multi-tier IT application environments.

What you learn in this:

· Why we need Ansible?

· Advantages of using Ansible

· What Ansible do?

· Ansible architecture

Why Do We Need Ansible?

Everybody likes it because it brings huge time savings when we install packages or configure large numbers of servers.

Let us take a little flashback to the beginning of networked computing when deploying and managing servers reliably and efficiently has been a challenge. Previously, system administrators managed servers by hand, installing software, changing configurations, and administering services on individual servers.
As data centers grew, and hosted applications became more complex, administrators realized they couldn’t scale their manual systems management as fast as the applications they were enabling. It also hampered the velocity of the work of the developers since the development team was agile and releasing software frequently, but IT operations were spending more time configuring the systems. That’s why server provisioning and configuration management tools came to flourish.

We always need to keep updating, pushing changes, copying files on them etc. These tasks make things very complicated and time consuming.

Some Ansible terminologies terms:

Ansible Terms:

• Controller Machine: The machine where Ansible is installed, responsible for running the provisioning on the servers you are managing.
• Inventory: An initialization file that contains information about the servers you are managing.
• Playbook: The entry point for Ansible provisioning, where the automation is defined through tasks using YAML format.
• Task: A block that defines a single procedure to be executed, e.g. Install a package.
• Module: A module typically abstracts a system task, like dealing with packages or creating and changing files. Ansible has a multitude of built-in modules, but you can also create custom ones.
• Role: A pre-defined way for organizing playbooks and other files in order to facilitate sharing and reusing portions of a provisioning.
• Play: A provisioning executed from start to finish is called a play. In simple words, execution of a playbook is called a play.
• Facts: Global variables containing information about the system, like network interfaces or operating system.
• Handlers: Used to trigger service status changes, like restarting or stopping a service.

Ansible is a helpful tool that allows you to create groups of machines, describe how these machines should be configured or what actions should be taken on them. Ansible issues all commands from a central location to perform these tasks.

Advantages of Using Ansible :-

Simple: Ansible uses a simple syntax written in YAML called playbooks. YAML is a human-readable data serialization language. It is extraordinarily simple. So, no special coding skills are required and even people in your IT organization, who do not know what is Ansible can likely read a playbook and understand what is happening. Ansible always executes tasks in order.

Agentless: Finally, Ansible is completely agentless. There are no agents/software or additional firewall ports that you need to install on the client systems or hosts which you want to automate. You do not have to separately set up a management infrastructure which includes managing your entire systems, network and storage. Ansible further reduces the effort required for your team to start automating right away.

Powerful & Flexible: Ansible has powerful features that can enable you to model even the most complex IT workflows. In this aspect, Ansible means that something is self-sufficient, comes out-of-the-box ready to use, with everything that is needed can manage the infrastructure, networks, operating systems and services that you are already using, as Ansible provides you with hundreds of modules to manage them.

Efficient: No extra software on your servers means more resources for your applications. Also, since Ansible modules work via JSON, Ansible is extensible with modules written in a programming language you already know. Ansible introduces modules as basic building blocks for your software.

What Ansible Can Do ?

Ansible is not just limited to Configuration Management. It can be used in many different ways too.

Use of ansible in different ways:

Provisioning: Your apps have to live somewhere. If you are starting with bare-metal servers or Virtual Machines, or creating virtual or cloud instances from templates, Ansible & Ansible Tower helps to streamline this process.

Configuration Management: It establishes and maintains consistency of the product performance by recording and updating detailed information which describes an company hardware and software. Such information typically includes the versions and updates that have been applied to installed software packages and the locations and network addresses of hardware devices.

Application Deployment: When you define your application with Ansible, and manage the deployment with Ansible Tower, teams are able to effectively manage the entire application life cycle from development to production. All you need to do just list these tasks in your Ansible playbook and see Ansible executing these tasks in order.

Security and Compliance: When you define your security policy in Ansible, scanning and remediation of site-wide security policy can be integrated into other automated processes. And it’ll be integral in everything that is deployed. It means that, you need to configure your security details once in your control machine and it will be embedded in all other nodes automatically.

Orchestration: Ansible provides Orchestration in the sense of aligning the business request with the applications, data, and infrastructure. It defines the policies and service levels through automated workflows, provisioning, and change management.

Ansible Architecture:

Ansible architecture is very simple and to understand.

The Ansible Automation engine :-

• Inventories: Ansible inventories are lists of hosts (nodes) along with their IP addresses, servers, databases etc. which needs to be managed. Ansible then takes action via a transport — SSH for UNIX, Linux or Networking devices and WinRM for Windows system.
• APIs: APIs in Ansible are used as transport for Cloud services, public or private.
• Modules: Modules are executed directly on remote hosts through playbooks. The modules can control system resources, like services, packages, or files (anything really), or execute system commands. Modules do it by acting on system files, installing packages or making API calls to the service network. There are over 450 Ansible-provided modules that automate nearly every part of your environment.
• Plugins: Plugins allows to execute Ansible tasks as a job build step. Plugins are pieces of code that augment Ansible’s core functionality. Ansible ships with a number of handy plugins, and you can easily write your own. For example,
• Action plugins are front ends to modules.
• Cache plugins are used to keep a cache.
• Callback plugins enable you to hook into Ansible events for display or logging purposes.

Components of Ansible Architecture :-

Networking: Ansible can also be used to automate different networks. Ansible uses the same simple, powerful, and the agentless automation framework IT operations and development are already using. It uses a data model (a playbook or role) that is separate from the Ansible automation engine that easily spans different network hardware.

Hosts: The hosts in the Ansible architecture are just node systems which are getting automated by Ansible. It can be any kind of machine — Windows, Linux, RedHat etc.

Playbooks: Playbooks are simple files written in YAML format which describes the tasks to be executed by Ansible. Playbooks can declare configurations, but they can also orchestrate the steps of any manual ordered process, even if it contains jump statements. They can launch tasks synchronously or asynchronously.

CMDB: It is a repository that acts as a data warehouse for IT installations. It holds data relating to a collection of IT assets (commonly referred to as configuration items (CI)), as well as to describe relationships between such assets.

Cloud: It is a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server. You can launch your resources and instances on cloud and connect to your servers.

thank you !