What is Ansible?
Ansible was originally written by Michael DeHaan in Python with its first release on February 20, 2012. It was later acquired by Red Hat. Ansible is an open source configuration management and orchestration utility. It helps to automate deployment or softwares and configurations of multiple remote hosts. Instead of writing custom, unmanaged, long and individual bash scripts, system administrators can write playbooks in Ansible. Ansible is also supported by DevOps tools, such as Vagrant and Jenkins.
Playbookis a YAML (YAML Ain’t Markup Language) file which consists a list ofPlays.- A
Playin a playbook is a list ofTasks. - A
Taskin a play containsModulesand its arguments. - Where as
Moduleare the ones that do the actual work in ansible.
How Ansible Works?
The greatest benefit of Ansible that I see is, unlike Puppet it is agent less. The only requirement on remote host (know as Managed Host) is Python 2.4 or later. If you are running less than Python 2.5 on the remotes, you will also need python-simplejson. Ansible is installed on a central host (know as Control Host) where Playbooks are created. Playbooks are pushed to Managed Host thru SSH as a Python code and executed locally on Managed Host.
