Overview on Ansible
- In one liner "Ansible is a super-simple automation platform that is agentless and extensible."
- It is an open source tool (with enterprise editions available) developed using Python and runs on Windows, Mac, and UNIX-like systems.
- Ansible is an orchestration engine in IT, which can be used for several use cases.
- Compared to other automation tools, Ansible brings you an easy way to configure your orchestration engine without the overhead of a client or central server setup.
- Another great feature is that Ansible is agentless.
- It uses SSH, so we don't have to prepare and install something before we start.
- It comes preloaded with a wide range of modules that make your life simpler.
Why use Ansible
Ansible has certain distinct advantages over other similar tools.
- Ansible is agentless. So we do not need to install any software on the servers that are to be managed. It does require Python runtime on the servers and a SSH server on remote hosts.
- Ansible supports both push and pull modes. So we can execute Ansible code from a central control machine to make changes on remote machines or the remote machines can pull configuration from a well defined source periodically.
- Code for Ansible is written in YAML (http://yaml.org/), which stands for YAML Ain't Markup Language.
- Ansible does not try to re-invent the wheel. Hence it uses SSH as a transport and YAML as a Domain Specific Language (DSL).
What's Next
Now next in our Ansible Tutorial we will about Ansible Architecture and important terminologies related to Ansible
