Covered Topics:
In Short:
Ansible is booming the automation market very much. It is a small part of DevOps but in general, it is a huge subject. You can automate cloud, network devices, dockers, and many more other subjects.
Ansible History:
Ansible was released in 2012 by Michael DeHaan, a developer who has been working with configuration management and infrastructure orchestration in one form or another for many years. Ansible, Inc. (originally AnsibleWorks, Inc.) was the company set up to commercially support and sponsor Ansible. Red Hat acquired Ansible in October 2015. Ansible is available to all the Linux os like RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc via Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL).
What is Ansible?
Ansible provides a simple domain-specific language (DSL) to enable these different use cases. Ansible is popular among infrastructure engineers and developers because it requires minimal time and effort to get up and running. Ansible is built around an agent-less architecture in which Ansible is installed on a control node and clients do not need any special agent software.
For whom it is?
Only network and cloud engineers know the true value of how automation is helping them. If you are going for CISCO DEVNET Associate, professional, CCNA, CCNP, RHEL certification you compulsory need to learn this topic also some other certificate courses contain this subject.
What Ansible can do?
Ansible can be used to manage many different types of systems, including servers running Linux, Microsoft Windows, or UNIX, and network devices. Any type of network device like a switch, router, AP can be automated easily. It also allows cloud-like GCP and AWS.
How Ansible Works?
There are two types of machines in the Ansible architecture: the control nodes and managed hosts. Ansible communicates with remote machines over the SSH protocol. By default, Ansible uses native OpenSSH and connects to remote machines using your current user name, just as SSH does.
Ansible is installed and run from a control node, and this machine also has copies of your Ansible project files. The control node could be an administrator's laptop or pc, a system shared by several administrators. The control node should be a Linux or UNIX system. Microsoft Windows is less supported as a control node, although Windows systems can be managed by hosts.
Advantages of Ansible:
- Free: Ansible is an open-source tool. Powerful: It lets you model a highly complex Workflow.
- Cross-platform support: Ansible provides agentless support for Linux, Windows, UNIX, and network devices, in physical, virtual, cloud, and container environments.
- Human-readable automation: Ansible Playbooks, written as YAML text files, are easy to read and help ensure that everyone understands what they will do.
- Agentless: No need to install any software of firewall ports on the client system. Feature: Very Simple, reliable, and consistent.
- Perfect description of applications: Every change can be made by Ansible Playbooks, and every aspect of your application environment can be described and documented.
- Easy to manage in version control: Ansible Playbooks and projects are plain text.
- They can be treated as source code and placed in your existing version control system.
Disadvantages of Ansible:
- Limitation: Insufficient User Interface.
- Lack of any Notion of State: Ansible does not track dependencies and simply executes sequential tasks and stops when tasks finish, fail, or any error comes.
- Limited Windows Support.
- The next prominent mention among Ansible's disadvantages is the half-built Windows support.
- Ansible version 1.7 supports Windows as well as Linux/Unix nodes.
- In the case of Windows, Ansible employs a native Power Shell remoting rather than SSH. As a result, a Linux control machine is mandatory for the management of Windows hosts.
- The limited support for Windows in Ansible presents a formidable setback with the configuration management and automation tool.