Ansible – IT Automation simple

Posted on: January 3, 2016 /

Categories: Automation, DevOps

Ansible delivers simple IT automation that ends repetitive tasks and frees up DevOps teams for more strategic work.

Ansible is a simple automation language that can perfectly describe an IT application infrastructure. It’s easy-to-learn, self-documenting, and doesn’t require a grad-level computer science degree to read. Automation shouldn’t be more complex than the tasks it’s replacing.

SIMPLE

Human readable automation
No special coding skills needed
Tasks executed in order

AGENTLESS

Agentless architecture
Uses OpenSSH and WinRM
No agents to exploit or update

HOW ANSIBLE WORKS

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.

Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.

It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy – and most importantly, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allow you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.

On this page, we’ll give you a really quick overview so you can see things in context. For more detail, hop over to docs.ansible.com.

EFFICIENT ARCHITECTURE

Ansible works by connecting to your nodes and pushing out small programs, called “Ansible modules” to them. These programs are written to be resource models of the desired state of the system. Ansible then executes these modules (over SSH by default), and removes them when finished.

Your library of modules can reside on any machine, and there are no servers, daemons, or databases required. Typically you’ll work with your favorite terminal program, a text editor, and probably a version control system to keep track of changes to your content.

SSH KEYS ARE YOUR FRIENDS

Passwords are supported, but SSH keys with ssh-agent are one of the best ways to use Ansible. Though if you want to use Kerberos, that’s good too. Lots of options! Root logins are not required, you can login as any user, and then su or sudo to any user.

Ansible’s “authorized_key” module is a great way to use ansible to control what machines can access what hosts. Other options, like kerberos or identity management systems, can also be used.