Ansible Explained: The Beginner's Guide to IT Automation with Playbooks, Tower, and More
- Chandan Rajpurohit
- Nov 14, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 13
Managing 50 servers manually? Applying the same config patch across 200 machines one by one? That's exactly the problem Ansible was built to solve.
Ansible is a community project sponsored by Red Hat, it’s an open-source project that helps automate IT tasks.
In simple terms, if I want to define Ansible then it would be like
Ansible is a simple automation tool which helps us to automate most IT tasks.
Why Ansible? / Advantages of Ansible
It is free to use by everyone.
It is lightweight, and no constraints regarding the operating system or underlying hardware are present.
It is secure due to its agentless capabilities and open SSH security features.
Its modularity regarding plugins, inventories, modules, and playbooks makes Ansible the perfect companion to orchestrate large environments.
Ansible Playbook
An Ansible playbook is a file that contains a set of instructions (tasks) that are executed by Ansible.
Playbooks are written in YAML format and are used to automate tasks such as configuration management, infrastructure management, application deployment, and system administration.
A playbook consists of one or more plays, which are a collection of tasks that are performed on a single host or set of hosts.
Tasks can be as simple as below:
installing a package
applying a security patch
creating a user account
copying a file etc…
As Ansible is agentless, playbooks can be created once and can be executed as and when needed on servers/ hosts.
Playbooks are designed to be idempotent, meaning that they can be run multiple times without causing any adverse effects.
Other Ansible Products
Ansible Galaxy
Galaxy provides pre-packaged units of work known to Ansible as roles and collections.
Ansible AWX
The AWX project—AWX for short—is an open-source community project, sponsored by Red Hat, that enables users to better control their community Ansible project use in IT environments. AWX is the upstream project from which the automation controller component is ultimately derived.
Ansible Vault
Ansible Vault is a feature of ansible that allows you to keep sensitive data such as passwords or keys in encrypted files, rather than as plaintext in playbooks or roles. These vault files can then be distributed or placed in source control.
Ansible Tower
Ansible Tower is an automation platform that provides a web-based UI interface for managing and running Ansible automation tasks and playbooks. It is developed by Red Hat and is designed to provide a centralized platform for IT teams to manage and automate their infrastructure and application deployments.
Ansible Tower helps organizations improve productivity and reduce downtime by automating repetitive tasks and ensuring consistent configuration across their entire infrastructure. It also reduce human errors and provide the accurate result which saves time.
With Ansible Tower, you can:
Automate repetitive tasks, which saves time and reduces errors.
Ensure that all systems are configured consistently, which improves reliability and security.
Schedule tasks to run automatically at a specific time or on a regular schedule.
See the status of your automation jobs in one place, which helps you track progress and troubleshoot problems.
Use a REST API to integrate Ansible Tower with other systems and automate your workflows.
Manage multiple environments (like development, testing, and production) from a single platform.
Create complex workflows that involve multiple playbooks and dependencies.
Overall, Ansible Tower is a powerful tool that helps IT teams be more productive and efficient by automating their tasks and workflows.
Join the community
Ready to try Ansible? The best starting point is the official documentation and the Ansible Galaxy library of ready-made roles. If you run into issues or want to explore further, the community forum at ansible.com is very active.