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what can ansible be used for

by Aurelia Hirthe Published 3 years ago Updated 2 years ago
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Benefits of Ansible

  • Free : Ansible is an open-source tool.
  • Very simple to set up and use : No special coding skills are necessary to use Ansible’s playbooks (more on playbooks...
  • Powerful : Ansible lets you model even highly complex IT workflows.
  • Flexible : You can orchestrate the entire application environment no matter where it’s deployed. You can also customize...

Ansible can be used to provision the underlying infrastructure of your environment, virtualized hosts and hypervisors, network devices, and bare metal servers. It can also install services, add compute hosts, and provision resources, services, and applications inside of your cloud.Nov 2, 2020

Full Answer

Why and how we use Ansible?

How Ansible Works EFFICIENT ARCHITECTURE. Ansible works by connecting to your nodes and pushing out small programs, called "Ansible... SSH KEYS ARE YOUR FRIENDS. Passwords are supported, but SSH keys with ssh-agent are one of the best ways to use Ansible. MANAGE YOUR INVENTORY IN SIMPLE TEXT FILES. ...

What are the main use cases of Ansible?

Ansible is an open source tool that can be used for Infrastructure provisioning and configuration management. The CLI based usage is free with no limits on the number of nodes being handled. Ansible Tower on the other hand comes with a free license for handling upto 10 nodes. You will have to pay for anything more.

How to get started using Ansible?

 · Unlike more simplistic management tools, Ansible users (like system administrators, developers and architects) can use Ansible automation to install software, automate daily tasks, provision infrastructure, improve security and compliance, patch systems, and share automation across the entire organization. Explore Ansible certified content

What is Ansible and what can it automate?

Ansible is the only automation engine that can automate the entire application lifecycle and continuous delivery pipeline. USE CASES Provisioning Configuration Management App Deployment Continuous Delivery Security & Compliance Orchestration INTEGRATIONS Infrastructure Networks Containers Cloud DevOps Tools

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 · Benefits of Ansible Free : Ansible is an open-source tool. Very simple to set up and use : No special coding skills are necessary to use Ansible’s playbooks (more on playbooks... Powerful : Ansible lets you model even highly complex IT workflows. Flexible : You can orchestrate the entire application ...

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What are the main use cases of Ansible?

Ansible has various use cases in Provisioning, Configuration Management, Application Deployment, Continuous Deployment, Automation, and Orchestration. So, if you are looking forward to a career in DevOps, IT automation, and managing cloud infrastructure then Ansible is a must-have.

What can I automate with Ansible?

Here are five daily sysadmin tasks that you can automate with Ansible.Check server uptime. ... Configure additional cron jobs. ... Gather server stats and sars. ... Collect server logs. ... Install or remove packages and software. ... 10 lessons from sysadmins adapting to change in 2020. ... 10 Ansible modules for Linux system automation.

What is the use of Ansible in DevOps?

Ansible is the most preferred DevOps tool for orchestration, automation, configuration, and managing the IT Infrastructure. The benefits of Ansible in DevOps is to respond and scale in pace with the demand.

What problems does Ansible solve?

Ansible and Red Hat Ansible Tower can help streamline the process of provisioning systems, whether you are PXE booting and kickstarting bare-metal servers or virtual machines, or creating virtual machines or cloud instances from templates.

What is difference between Jenkins and Ansible?

Ansible is a powerful tool for automation to the provision of the target environment and to then deploy the application. Jenkins is a popular tool for IT automation and used for Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to provision the target environment.

How is Ansible different from Docker?

Ansible is an orchestration tool used to manage the applications or software in the given environment. Docker is a containerization technology used to isolate applications from the host OS. Configuration execution is easy to process in Ansible and there is no containerization process.

Which three tasks can be done using Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source automation tool, or platform, used for IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, intraservice orchestration, and provisioning.

Is Ansible worth learning?

It is worth using for the similar reasons to other configuration management systems. It is much better to use templates, and version control and be able to rebuild things from scripts that you have confidence in.

Is Ansible similar to Kubernetes?

The differences between these two products are profound. Ansible is an IT automation tool that deploys software, configures systems, and organizes more complex IT functions such as rolling updates or continuous deployments. On the other hand, Kubernetes is a system designed to orchestrate Docker containers.

Which three tasks can be done using Ansible OCI?

OCI Ansible Modules enable orchestrating, provisioning, and configuration management tasks on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

What is wrong Ansible?

The main problem is that running each module on a remote host takes some setup time. This also getting worse in large deployments in which some servers behave strangely or have network issues. To circumvent this, we used Ansible pull to run some of our most time consuming roles.

Does Ansible help you work on highly complex IT workflows?

Powerful: Ansible lets you model even highly complex IT workflows. Flexible: You can orchestrate the entire application environment no matter where it's deployed. You can also customize it based on your needs.

What is Ansible on GitHub?

Ansible is the most popular open source automation tool on GitHub today. With over 2,900+ contributors submitting new modules all the time, rest assured that what you are automating is covered in Ansible already, or will be very soon.

What is Ansible Automation Platform?

Ansible Automation Platform builds on the underlying Ansible automation engine by adding control, security, and delegation capabilities. With Ansible Tower, your team can automate – and your business can innovate.

What is Ansible workflow?

Ansible seamlessly unites workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in one easy-to-use and deploy platform.

How does Ansible work?

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.

What is Ansible software?

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

What is ansible authorized key?

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.

What is ansible INI?

By default, Ansible represents what machines it manages using a very simple INI file that puts all of your managed machines in groups of your own choosing.

What language does Ansible use?

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.

How many modules are there in Ansible?

Ansible contains a giant toolbox of built-in modules, well over 750 of them.

Can you use SSH keys with Ansible?

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.

What is Ansible application?

Ansible allows you to deploy multi-tier applications reliably and consistently, all from one common framework. You can configure needed services as well as push application artifacts from one common system.

How does Ansible work?

Ansible works by connecting to what you want automated and pushing programs that execute instructions that would have been done manually. These programs utilize Ansible modules that are written based on the specific expectations of the endpoint’s connectivity, interface, and commands. Ansible then executes these modules (over standard SSH by default), and removes them when finished (if applicable).

What is Ansible software?

Ansible® is an open source IT automation tool that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and many other manual IT processes . Unlike more simplistic management tools, Ansible users (like system administrators, developers and architects) can use Ansible automation to install software, automate daily tasks, provision infrastructure, improve security and compliance, patch systems, and share automation across the entire organization.

What is an ansible playbook?

An Ansible playbook is a blueprint of automation tasks—which are complex IT actions executed with no need for human involvement. Ansible playbooks are written in human-readable YAML format and executed on a set, group, or classification of hosts, which together make up an Ansible inventory.

Why is Ansible important?

No one likes repetitive tasks. With Ansible, IT admins can begin automating away the drudgery from their daily tasks. Automation frees admins up to focus on efforts that help deliver more value to the business by speeding time to application delivery, and building on a culture of success. Ultimately, Ansible gives teams the one thing they can never get enough of: time. Allowing smart people to focus on smart things.

What is Ansible on GitHub?

Ansible is the most popular open source automation tool on GitHub today with more than a quarter million downloads per month. With over 3,550 contributors submitting new modules all the time, rest assured that what you are automating is covered in Ansible already, or will be very soon.

What is ansible automation?

Allowing smart people to focus on smart things. 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.

Is Ansible a digital business?

Every business is a digital business. Technology is your innovation engine, and delivering your applications faster helps you win. Historically, that required a lot of manual effort and complicated coordination. But today, there is Ansible - the simple, yet powerful IT automation engine that thousands of companies are using to drive complexity out of their environments and accelerate DevOps initiatives.

What is Ansible used for?

Ansible is an open-source automation tool, or platform, used for IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, intraservice orchestration, and provisioning. Automation is crucial these days, with IT environments that are too complex and often need to scale too quickly for system administrators and developers to keep up if they had to do everything manually. Automation simplifies complex tasks, not just making developers’ jobs more manageable but allowing them to focus attention on other tasks that add value to an organization. In other words, it frees up time and increases efficiency. And Ansible, as noted above, is rapidly rising to the top in the world of automation tools. Let’s look at some of the reasons for Ansible’s popularity.

How does Ansible work?

Ansible lets you quickly and easily deploy multitier apps. You won’t need to write custom code to automate your systems; you list the tasks required to be done by writing a playbook, and Ansible will figure out how to get your systems to the state you want them to be in. In other words, you won’t have to configure the applications on every machine manually. When you run a playbook from your control machine, Ansible uses SSH to communicate with the remote hosts and run all the commands (tasks).

How much does Ansible pay?

And learning how to use Ansible with Docker won’t just benefit your organization; according to Payscale, the average salary of a developer with Ansible skills is $110,000 per year, and some developers earn even more. According to Dice, Ansible is the highest-paying DevOps skill.

What is ansible configuration?

Ansible configurations are simple data descriptions of infrastructure and are both readable by humans and parsable by machines. All you need to start managing systems is a password or an SSH (Secure Socket Shell, a network protocol) key.

Why are Ansible playbooks so portable?

The fact that Ansible playbooks are portable, meaning they can be used anywhere, as well as repeatable, can save you a lot of time and effort. For example, if you use a pure Dockerfile to build a container, then you can reproduce the application only in a Docker container.

How many modules does Ansible have?

Ansible executes all the modules for installing updates or whatever the required task is, and then removes them when finished. Ansible provides more than 450 modules for everyday tasks. 2. Plugins.

What is ansible inventory?

All the machines you’re using with Ansible (the control machine plus nodes) are listed in a single simple file, along with their IP addresses, databases, servers, and so on. Once you register the inventory, you can assign variables to any of the hosts using a simple text file. You can also pull inventory from sources like EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud).

How does Ansible work?

It works by connecting to your nodes and pushing small programs to them. These programs make the system comply with a desired state, and, when they have finished their tasks, they are deleted. Ansible works over SSH and doesn't require any daemons, special servers, or libraries to work.

Why is Ansible so popular?

Everybody likes it because it brings huge time savings when we install packages or configure large numbers of servers.

Is Ansible easy to read?

When I talk about ease of use, I really mean it. This is an Ansible playbook necessary to configure a three-node OpenIO cluster . It is easy to read and edit to reflect your cluster needs. With Ansible, we overcame all the limits imposed by other tools and it allowed us to build simple playbooks that can run for one as well as for hundreds of nodes, dramatically speeding up deployments while making sure that nobody tampered with single nodes.

Is Ansible a good investment?

Ansible has been a huge investment for us. We come from other automation tools (Puppet was the most used for quite some time), but we needed a much more flexible solution, capable of matching the flexibility of OpenIO, which itself can be deployed in several ways and on the most heterogenous environments.

Is Ansible open source?

There is actually a 4th reason: it is open source. But this is a pretty common characteristic for this type of tool, so it is not a major differentiator. When compared with similar tools, Ansible offers us one more great benefit. It is declarative and not procedural.

Does Ansible work with OpenIO?

OpenIO is about storage, but Ansible works with all infrastructure components and every major vendor provides some sort of support for it. If you are a sysadmin with large infrastructure to manage, I strongly suggest you check out Ansible. It’s easy to learn how to use, and it can save you a lot of time when you need to perform highly repetitive tasks on your infrastructure.

What is Ansible used for?

While many IT professionals already know that Ansible is the favored tool for automating system and infrastructure configuration, application deployment, configuration management, and continuous delivery, it always makes it an easy sell to upper management and other users when an organization like Forrester weighs in. In the same spirit, it also helps to have some examples of why something is popular, beyond its industry reputation, to share.

Who created Ansible infrastructure?

Mark Phillips creates a network and Ansible infrastructure in his Bootstrapping hardware article.

Does Ansible automate tasks?

Ansible doesn't just automate day-to-day tasks; it can also bootstrap hardware. You can find out how to set this up in two articles:

Is Ansible a Linux system?

If you're an admin for Linux and Unix systems, Ansible is an easy and pretty natural fit. But when faced with Windows systems, you might be a little intimidated. At this point, Windows doesn't even ship with Python, much less OpenSSH, so there are obviously some adjustments you'll have to make.

Is there much to Ansible?

The truth of the matter is that there wouldn't be much to Ansible if it weren't for its excellent collection of modules. Like third-party libraries for Python or applications for your mobile phone, the technical driver of all the useful and surprisingly easy tricks Ansible is famous for are the parts that other people have already figured out for you.

What's the cloud without containers?

What's the cloud without containers? Once you've got your cloud tasks automated, you'll be happy to know that Ansible also can help generate the containers you need when delivering your applications or spinning up services. Tomas Tomecek guides you through the process in his Building container images with the Ansible-bender tool article.

Does Ansible talk to K8s?

Of course, Ansible doesn't talk only to K8s. There are many other cloud-related modules available, including ones for OpenShift, Atomic, Azure, Docker, Podman, and many other components of your open hybrid cloud (or, if you're not that lucky, your proprietary one).

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1.Ansible Use Cases

Url:https://www.ansible.com/use-cases

13 hours ago How Ansible Works EFFICIENT ARCHITECTURE. Ansible works by connecting to your nodes and pushing out small programs, called "Ansible... SSH KEYS ARE YOUR FRIENDS. Passwords are supported, but SSH keys with ssh-agent are one of the best ways to use Ansible. MANAGE YOUR INVENTORY IN SIMPLE TEXT FILES. ...

2.How Ansible Works | Ansible.com

Url:https://www.ansible.com/overview/how-ansible-works

12 hours ago Ansible is an open source tool that can be used for Infrastructure provisioning and configuration management. The CLI based usage is free with no limits on the number of nodes being handled. Ansible Tower on the other hand comes with a free license for handling upto 10 nodes. You will have to pay for anything more.

3.What is Ansible?

Url:https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/ansible/what-is-ansible

1 hours ago  · Unlike more simplistic management tools, Ansible users (like system administrators, developers and architects) can use Ansible automation to install software, automate daily tasks, provision infrastructure, improve security and compliance, patch systems, and share automation across the entire organization. Explore Ansible certified content

4.Videos of What Can Ansible Be Used For

Url:/videos/search?q=what+can+ansible+be+used+for&qpvt=what+can+ansible+be+used+for&FORM=VDRE

31 hours ago Ansible is the only automation engine that can automate the entire application lifecycle and continuous delivery pipeline. USE CASES Provisioning Configuration Management App Deployment Continuous Delivery Security & Compliance Orchestration INTEGRATIONS Infrastructure Networks Containers Cloud DevOps Tools

5.IT Automation with Ansible

Url:https://www.ansible.com/overview/it-automation

13 hours ago  · Benefits of Ansible Free : Ansible is an open-source tool. Very simple to set up and use : No special coding skills are necessary to use Ansible’s playbooks (more on playbooks... Powerful : Ansible lets you model even highly complex IT workflows. Flexible : You can orchestrate the entire application ...

6.What is Ansible And How to Use Ansible in Docker

Url:https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/ansible-tutorial/what-is-ansible

18 hours ago  · Ansible automates and simplifies repetitive, complex, and tedious operations. Everybody likes it because it brings huge time savings when we install packages or configure large numbers of servers. Its architecture is simple and effective. It works by connecting to your nodes and pushing small programs to them.

7.Why and How We Use Ansible - OpenIO Object Storage

Url:https://www.openio.io/blog/why-and-how-we-use-ansible

9 hours ago  · While many IT professionals already know that Ansible is the favored tool for automating system and infrastructure configuration, application deployment, configuration management, and continuous delivery, it always makes it an easy sell to upper management and other users when an organization like Forrester weighs in.

8.7 things you can do with Ansible right now

Url:https://opensource.com/article/20/9/ansible

7 hours ago Installing Software . There are three main ways that Ansible can be used to install software: Using the win_chocolatey module. This sources the program data from the default public Chocolatey repository. Internal repositories can be used instead by setting the source option.. Using the win_package module. This installs software using an MSI or .exe installer from a local/network …

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