Orchestration Tool Ansible

What is Ansible

Ansible: Ansible an open-source IT configuration Management, Deployment and Orchestration Tool. They provide large productivity gains with a wide Variety of Automation Challenges.

Ansible History:

• Michael Dehaan has developed an Ansible and the project was began in February 2012.

• Redhat acquired the ansible tool in 2015.

• Ansible is available for RHEL, Debian, Centos, Oracle, Linux.

Advantages:

• Ansible is free to use by everyone.

• It is very consistent, lightweight, constraints regarding the OS or underlying hardware are present.

• It is very secure due to its agentless capabilities and open SSH security features.

• Ansible does not need any special system administrator skill to install and use it.

• Push Mechanism.

Disadvantages:

• Insufficient user interface though ansible tower is GUI, it is still in development stages.

• Cannot achieve full automation by ansible.

• New to file market, therefore, limited support and document is available

Terms used in Ansible:

Ansible server: The machine where Ansible is installed and from which all task and playbook will be run.

Module: It is a set of similar command mean to be executed for the client-side.

Task: It is a section that consists of a single procedure to be completed.

Role: A way of organising tasks and related files to be later called in a playbook.

Fact: Information fetched from the client system from the global variables with the gather-facts operation.

Inventory: File containing data about the ansible client servers.

Play: Execution of a playbook.

Handler: It is called only if a notifier is present.

Notifier: It is a Section attributed to a task which calls a handler if the output is changed.

Playbooks: It consists of code in YAML format, which describes tasks to be executed.

Host: Nodes, which are automated by Ansible.

Ansible Modules:

• The ships with a number of modules that will be executed directly on remote hosts or through the playbook.

• The module of library will be reside on any machine, and there are not server daemons, or databases required.

Ansible Playbook:

• Playbook in ansible are written in YAML format.

• It is human readable data serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files.

• Playbook is like a file where you write codes consist of vars, tasks, handlers, files, templates and roles.

• Each playbook is composed of one or more ‘modules’ in a list Module is a colllection of configuration files.

• Playbook are dvided into many section like-

Target Section: Define the host against which playbook task has to be executed.

Variable Section:Define variables.

Task Section:List of all modules that we need to run in an order.