What is Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source automation tool that helps you manage and configure your infrastructure, applications, and services. It uses a simple, agentless architecture that relies on SSH for communication between nodes. Ansible is widely used for automating tasks such as deployment, configuration management, and continuous delivery. With Ansible, you can define your infrastructure and applications in a human-readable format using YAML or JSON files, making it easy to manage and maintain your environment.

Main Features of Ansible

Some of the key features of Ansible include:

• Agentless architecture: Ansible doesn’t require any agents to be installed on the nodes it manages.
• Simple and easy to use: Ansible uses a simple, declarative language to define your infrastructure and applications.
• Extensive library of modules: Ansible has a large collection of modules that can be used to manage various aspects of your infrastructure and applications.

How to Use Ansible

Getting Started with Ansible

To get started with Ansible, you’ll need to install it on your control node. You can do this by running the following command:

sudo pip install ansible

Once Ansible is installed, you can start creating playbooks, which are the configuration files that define your infrastructure and applications.

Creating a Playbook

A playbook is a YAML or JSON file that defines a set of tasks to be executed on a group of nodes. Here’s an example of a simple playbook:

---- name: Install and configure Apache hosts: webservers become: yes tasks: - name: Install Apache apt: name: apache2 state: present

This playbook installs and configures Apache on a group of nodes called