What Is Ansible

What Is Ansible What Is Ansible? Configuration Management And Automation With Ansible Back Home Categories Online Courses Mock Interviews Webinars NEW Community Write for Us Categories Artificial Intelligence AI vs Machine Learning vs Deep LearningMachine Learning AlgorithmsArtificial Intelligence TutorialWhat is Deep LearningDeep Learning TutorialInstall TensorFlowDeep Learning with PythonBackpropagationTensorFlow TutorialConvolutional Neural Network TutorialVIEW ALL BI and Visualization What is TableauTableau TutorialTableau Interview QuestionsWhat is InformaticaInformatica Interview QuestionsPower BI TutorialPower BI Interview QuestionsOLTP vs OLAPQlikView TutorialAdvanced Excel Formulas TutorialVIEW ALL Big Data What is HadoopHadoop ArchitectureHadoop TutorialHadoop Interview QuestionsHadoop EcosystemData Science vs Big Data vs Data AnalyticsWhat is Big DataMapReduce TutorialPig TutorialSpark TutorialSpark Interview QuestionsBig Data TutorialHive TutorialVIEW ALL Blockchain Blockchain TutorialWhat is BlockchainHyperledger FabricWhat Is EthereumEthereum TutorialB lockchain ApplicationsSolidity TutorialBlockchain ProgrammingHow Blockchain WorksVIEW ALL Cloud Computing What is AWSAWS TutorialAWS CertificationAzure Interview QuestionsAzure TutorialWhat Is Cloud ComputingWhat Is SalesforceIoT TutorialSalesforce TutorialSalesforce Interview QuestionsVIEW ALL Cyber Security Cloud SecurityWhat is CryptographyNmap TutorialSQL Injection AttacksHow To Install Kali LinuxHow to become an Ethical Hacker?Footprinting in Ethical HackingNetwork Scanning for Ethical HackingARP SpoofingApplication SecurityVIEW ALL Data Science Python Pandas TutorialWhat is Machine LearningMachine Learning TutorialMachine Learning ProjectsMachine Learning Interview QuestionsWhat Is Data ScienceSAS TutorialR TutorialData Science ProjectsHow to become a data scientistData Science Interview QuestionsData Scientist SalaryVIEW ALL Data Warehousing and ETL What is Data WarehouseDimension Table in Data WarehousingData Warehousing Interview QuestionsData warehouse architectureTalend T utorialTalend ETL ToolTalend Interview QuestionsFact Table and its TypesInformatica TransformationsInformatica TutorialVIEW ALL Databases What is MySQLMySQL Data TypesSQL JoinsSQL Data TypesWhat is MongoDBMongoDB Interview QuestionsMySQL TutorialSQL Interview QuestionsSQL CommandsMySQL Interview QuestionsVIEW ALL DevOps What is DevOpsDevOps vs AgileDevOps ToolsDevOps TutorialHow To Become A DevOps EngineerDevOps Interview QuestionsWhat Is DockerDocker TutorialDocker Interview QuestionsWhat Is ChefWhat Is KubernetesKubernetes TutorialVIEW ALL Front End Web Development What is JavaScript â€" All You Need To Know About JavaScriptJavaScript TutorialJavaScript Interview QuestionsJavaScript FrameworksAngular TutorialAngular Interview QuestionsWhat is REST API?React TutorialReact vs AngularjQuery TutorialNode TutorialReact Interview QuestionsVIEW ALL Mobile Development Android TutorialAndroid Interview QuestionsAndroid ArchitectureAndroid SQLite DatabaseProgramming Confi... DevOps (84 Bl ogs) Become a Certified Professional AWS Global Infrastructure Introduction To DevOps What is DevOps? A Beginner's Guide To Understanding DevOps And Its EvolutionWhat Are Important Pre-Requisites For DevOps Professionals?DevOps in various domains â€" How DevOps solves the problem?DevOps Real Time Scenarios â€" Know What Happens Real TimeWaterfall vs Agile: Which Is Better For You And Why?DevOps vs Agile! Everything You Need To KnowMystery of DevOpsInfrastructure as Code â€" What is it and Why is it it important?Linux commands in DevOps: Must Know For Every DevOps ProfessionalDevOps Tutorial : Introduction To DevOpsTop 10 DevOps Tools You Must Know In 2020Understanding DevOps Tools Development, Testing Deployment Technologies Involved In DevOps Git Configuration Management And Automation With Ansible Last updated on May 22,2019 90.9K Views Reshma Ahmed Reshma is a tech-savvy professional working as a Research Analyst at Edureka.... Reshma is a tech-savvy professional work ing as a Research Analyst at Edureka. She is a DevOps evangelist, a Cloud enthusiast, a Big Data Hadoop...7 Comments Bookmark 1 / 8 Blog from Ansible Become a Certified Professional What Is Ansible?This is the first blog of my Ansible tutorial series on What Is Ansible. I hope you will enjoy reading it.Ansible is an open source IT Configuration Management, Deployment Orchestration tool. It aims to provide large productivity gains to a wide variety of automation challenges. This tool is very simple to use yet powerful enough to automate complex multi-tier IT application environments.On this blog you will be learning:What is Ansible?Why do we need Ansible?Advantages of using AnsibleWhat Ansible can do?Ansible ArchitectureAnsible in DevOpsReal-Life usage of Ansible by NASASome Ansible terms, to help you understand Ansible better.You can go through this What is Ansible video lecture where our Ansible Training expert is discussing each every nuance of the technology.What is Ansible | DevOps Training | EdurekaWhy Do We Need Ansible?Well before Itell you what is Ansible, it is of utmost importance to understand the problems that were faced before Ansible.Let us take a little flashback to the beginning of networked computing when deploying and managing serversreliably and efficiently has been a challenge. Previously, system administratorsmanaged servers by hand, installing software, changingconfigurations, and administering services on individual servers. As data centers grew, and hosted applications became more complex, administratorsrealized they couldnt scale their manual systems management as fast as theapplications they were enabling. It also hampered the velocity of the work of the developers since the development team was agile and releasing software frequently, but IT operations were spending more time configuring the systems. Thats why server provisioning and configurationmanagement tools came to flourish.Consider the tedious routine of administering a server fleet. We always need to keep updating, pushing changes, copying files on them etc. These tasks make things very complicated and time consuming.But let me tell you that there is a solution to the above stated problem. The solution is Ansible.But before I go ahead to explain you all about Ansible, let me get you familiarized with few Ansible terminologies:Ansible Terms:Controller Machine: The machine where Ansible is installed, responsible for running the provisioning on the servers you are managing.Inventory: An initializationfile that contains information about the servers you are managing.Playbook: The entry point for Ansible provisioning, where the automation is defined through tasks using YAML format.Task: A block that defines a single procedure to be executed, e.g. Install a package.Module: A module typically abstracts a system task, like dealing with packages or creating and changing files. Ansible has a multitude of built-in modules, but you can also create custom one s.Role: A pre-defined way for organizing playbooks and other files in order to facilitate sharing and reusing portions of a provisioning.Play: A provisioning executed from start to finish is called a play.In simple words, execution of a playbook is called a play.Facts: Global variables containing information about the system, like network interfaces or operating system.Handlers: Used to trigger service status changes, like restarting or stopping a service.Ansible is a helpful tool that allows you to create groups of machines, describe how these machines should be configured or what actions should be taken on them. Ansible issues all commands from a central location to perform these tasks. No other client software is installed on the node machines. It uses SSH to connect to the nodes.Ansible only needs to be installed on the control machine (the machine from which you will be running commands) which can even be your laptop. It is a simple solution to a complicated problem.I am not bo asting off when I say that Ansible has filled up all the holes in Configuration Management and IT Orchestration world. You will know it too, when you take a look at the benefits of Ansible mentioned below:Advantages Of Using Ansible Simple:Ansible uses a simple syntax written in YAML called playbooks. YAML is a human-readable data serialization language. It is extraordinarily simple. So, no special coding skills are required and even people in your IT organization, who do not know what is Ansible can likely read a playbook and understand what is happening.Ansible always executes tasks in order. It is simple to install too (Dont believe me? Check out my Ansible Installation blog). Altogether the simplicity ensures that you can get started quickly. Agentless:Finally, Ansible is completely agentless. There are no agents/software or additional firewall portsthat you need to install on the client systems or hosts which you want toautomate.You do not have to separately set up a managemen t infrastructure which includes managing your entire systems, network and storage. Ansible further reduces the effort required for your team to start automating right away.Powerful Flexible: Ansible has powerful features that can enable you to model even the most complex IT workflows. In this aspect,Ansibles batteries includedapproach(This philosophymeans that something is self-sufficient, comes out-of-the-box ready to use, with everything that is needed)can manage the infrastructure, networks, operating systems and services that you are already using, as Ansible provides you with hundreds of modules to manage them.Together Ansibles capabilities allow you to orchestrate the entire application environment regardless of where it is deployed.Efficient: No extra software on your servers means more resources for your applications. Also, since Ansible modules work via JSON, Ansible is extensible with modules written in a programming language you already know. Ansible introduces modules a s basic building blocks for your software. So, you can even customize it as per your needs. For e.g. If you have an existing message sending module which sends messages in plain-text, and you want to send images too, you can add image sending features on top of it.What Ansible Can Do?Ansible is usually grouped along with other Configuration Management tools like Puppet, Chef, SaltStack etc. Well, let me tell you, Ansible is not just limited to Configuration Management. It can be used in many different ways too. I have mentioned some of them below: Provisioning:Your apps have to live somewhere. Ifyoure PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment) booting and kick starting bare-metal servers or Virtual Machines, or creating virtual or cloud instances from templates, Ansible Ansible Tower helps to streamline this process.For example, if I want to test the debug version of an application that is built with Visual C++, I ought to meet some prerequisite requirements like having Visual C++ library DLLs (msvcr100d.dll). I will also need Visual Studio installed in your computer. This is when Ansible makes sure that the required packages are downloaded and installed in order to provision my application. Configuration Management:It establishes and maintains consistency of the product performance by recording and updating detailed information which describes an enterprises hardware and software.Such information typically includes the versions and updates that have been applied to installed software packages and the locations and network addresses of hardware devices. For e.g. If you want to install the new version of Tomcat on all of the machines present in your enterprise, it is not feasible for you to manually go and update each and every machine. You can install Tomcat in one go on all of your machines with Ansible playbooks and inventory written in the most simple way. All you have to do is list out the IP addresses of your nodes in the inventory and write a playbook to insta ll Tomcat. Run the playbook from your control machine it will be installed on all your nodes. Application Deployment:When you define your application with Ansible, and manage the deployment with AnsibleTower, teams are able to effectively manage the entire application life cycle from development to production.For example,lets say I want to deploy the Default Servlet Engine. There are a number of steps that needs to be undergone to deploy the engine.Move a .war application from dropins directory to apps directoryAdd server.xml fileNavigate to the webpage to see your application.But why worry about performing these steps one by one when we have a tool like Ansible. All youneed to do is list these tasks in your Ansible playbook and sit back watching Ansible executing these tasks in order.Security and Compliance:When you define your security policy in Ansible, scanning and remediation of site-wide security policy can be integrated into other automated processes. And itll be integral in everything that is deployed.It means that, you need to configure your security details once in your control machine and it will be embedded in all other nodes automatically. Moreover, all the credentials (admin users ids passwords) that are stored within Ansible are not retrievable in plain-text by any user. Orchestration:Configurations alone dont define your environment. You need to define how multiple configurations interact and ensure the disparate pieces can be managed as a whole. Out of complexity and chaos, Ansible brings order.Ansible provides Orchestration in the sense of aligning the business request with the applications, data, and infrastructure. It defines the policies and service levels through automated workflows, provisioning, and change management. This creates an application-aligned infrastructure that can be scaled up or down based on the needs of each application.For example, Consider the situation where I want to deploy a new website in place of my existing one . For that, we will remove the existing website, and deploy our new website, and restart the load balancer or the web cluster if needed.Now, if we just did something like this, users would notice downtime because we have not removed live traffic going to these machines via the load balancer. So, we need some type of pre-task, where we tell the load balancer to put this web server into maintenance mode, so that we can temporarily disable traffic from going to it, as it gets upgraded. Lets say, I added a block up here, that says a pre-task will be to disable web node in the load balancer.So, this is our pre-task, where we disable traffic, then down here, we upgrade the node using these various tasks. Finally, we need some type of post-task, which will enable traffic to this web node again, by taking it out of maintenance mode. These tasks can be written in Ansible playbooks and hence it helps to orchestrate the environment.You will understand the working of Ansible betterwhen you stud y about its architecture.What is Ansible its Architecture?Ansible architecture is fairly straightforward. Refer to the diagram below to understand the Ansible architecture:As you can see, in the diagram above, the Ansible automation engine has a direct interaction with the users who write playbooks to execute the Ansible Automation engine. It also interacts with cloud services and Configuration Management Database (CMDB).The Ansible Automation engine consists of:Inventories: Ansible inventories are lists of hosts (nodes) along with their IP addresses, servers, databases etc. which needs to be managed.Ansible then takes action via a transport SSH for UNIX, Linux or Networking devices and WinRM for Windows system.APIs: APIs in Ansible are used as transport for Cloud services, public or private.Modules:Modules are executed directly on remote hosts through playbooks. The modules can control system resources, like services, packages, or files (anything really), or executesystem command s. Modules do it by acting on system files, installing packages or making API calls to the service network.There are over 450 Ansible-provided modules that automate nearly every part of your environment.For e.g. Cloud Modules like cloudformation which creates or deletes an AWS cloud formation stack; Database modules like mssql_db which removes MYSQL databases from remote hosts.Plugins: Pluginsallows to execute Ansible tasks as a job build step. Plugins are pieces of code that augment Ansibles core functionality. Ansible ships with a number of handy plugins, and you can easily write your own. For example,Action plugins are front ends to modules and can execute tasks on the controller before calling the modules themselves.Cache plugins are used to keep a cache of facts to avoid costly fact-gathering operations.Callback plugins enable you to hook into Ansible events for display or logging purposes.There are a few more components in Ansible Architecture which are explained below:Network ing: Ansible can also be used to automate different networks.Ansible uses the same simple, powerful, and the agentless automation framework IT operations and development are already using. It uses a data model (a playbook or role) that is separate from the Ansible automation engine that easily spans different network hardware.Hosts: The hosts in the Ansible architecture are just node systems which are getting automated by Ansible. It can be any kind of machine Windows, Linux, RedHat etc.Playbooks: Playbooks are simple files written in YAML format which describes the tasks to be executed by Ansible. Playbooks can declare configurations, but they can also orchestrate the steps of any manual ordered process, even if it contains jump statements. They can launch tasks synchronously or asynchronously.CMDB : Itis a repository that acts as a data warehouse for IT installations.It holds data relating to a collection of IT assets (commonly referred to as configuration items (CI)), as well as to describe relationships between such assets.Cloud: It is anetwork of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server. You can launch your resources and instances on cloud and connect to your servers.Ansible in DevOpsIn DevOps, as we know developmentand operations work is integrated. This integration is very important formodern test-driven application design. Hence, Ansible integrates this by providing a stable environment to both development and operations resulting in smooth orchestration. Refer to the image below to see how Ansible fits into DevOps:Let us discuss now how Ansible manages the entire DevOps infrastructure. When developers begin to think of infrastructure as partof their application i.e as Infrastructure as code (IaC), stability and performance become normative. Infrastructure as Code is the process of managing and provisioning computing infrastructure (processes, bare-metal servers, virtual servers, etc.) and th eir configuration through machine-processable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or the use of interactive configuration tools. This is where Ansible automation plays a major role and stands out among its peers.In DevOps, Sysadminswork tightly with developers,development velocity is improved, and more time is spent doing activities likeperformance tuning, experimenting, and getting things done, and less time is spent fixing problems. Refer to the diagram below to understand how the tasks of sysadmins and other users are simplified by Ansible.At this point you know how beneficial using Ansible is. So, now let us see a real life example of how NASA has benefited through Ansible.Ansible Case Study A Real Life Usage by NASALet us consider the business challenge that was faced by NASA.NASA needed to move 65 applications from a traditional hardware based data center to a cloud-based environment for better agility and cost savings. The rapid timeline resulted in many applications being migrated as it is to a cloud environment. This created an environment which spanned multiple virtual private clouds (VPCs) and AWS accounts that could not be managed easily. Even simple things, like ensuring every system administrator had access to every server, or simplesecurity patching, were extremely cumbersome.The solution was to leverage Ansible Tower to manage and schedule the cloud environment.Hence, to solve the problems that NASA had with lack of centralized management and a diverse environment, they evaluated multiple solutions and decided on an implementation of Ansible Tower. NASA is now leveraging Ansible Tower to manage their environment in a very organized and scheduled way.How NASA is using Ansible:Ansible Tower provided with a dashboard which provided the status summary of all hosts and jobs which allowed NASA to group all contents and manage access permissions across different departments. It also helped to split up the organization by ass ociating content and control permission for groups as well.Ansible Tower is a web-based interface for managing Ansible. One of the top items in Ansible users wishlists was an easy-to-use UI for managing quick deployments and monitoring ones configurations. Ansible management came up with Ansible Tower in response.Further, Ansible divided the tasks among teams by assigning various roles. It managed the clean up of old job history, activity streams, data marked for deletion and system tracking info. Refer to the diagram below to understand how Ansible has simplified the work of NASA.As a result, NASA has achieved the following efficiencies: NASA web app servers are being patched routinely and automatically through Ansible Tower with a very simple 10-line Ansible playbook. Ansible is also being used to re-mediate security issues and was leveraged to re-mediate OpenSSL issues. This not only saved time but allowed to quickly re-mediate a very daunting security issue. Every single week , both the full and mobile versions of www.nasa.gov are updated via Ansible, generally only taking about 5 minutes to do. OS level user accounts for mission critical staff are continually checked and created if missing. Now, everyone who needs access has access, even if that means adding or removing a user almost instantly from all servers. NASA has also integrated Ansible facts into their CMDB, CloudAware, for better management visibility of entire AWS inventory. As a result, it became possible to organize the inventory of AWS resources in a very granular way that was not possible before. Ansible is also used to ensure that the environment is compliant with necessary Federal security standards as outlined by FedRAMP and other regulatory requirements.Results:As a result of implementing Ansible, NASA is better equipped to manage its AWS environment. Ansibleallowed NASA to provide better operations and security to its clients. It has also increased efficiency as a team. If we see by the numbers: Updating nasa.gov went from over 1 hour to under 5 minutes Security Patching updates went from a multi-day process to 45 minutes Achieving near real-time RAM and disk monitoring (accomplished without agents) Provisioning OS Accounts across entire environment in under 10 minutes Baselining standard AMIs (Amazon Machine Image) went from 1 hour of manual configuration to becoming an invisible and seamless background process Application stacks set up time reduced from 1-2 hours to under 10 minutes per stack.I hope you have enjoyed this blog and learned what is Ansible. Now let us learn how to use Ansible using Adhoc commands and playbooks in my next blog on Ansible Tutorial.If you found this What is Ansible relevant,check out theDevOps trainingby Edureka,a trusted online learning companywith a network of more than250,000satisfied learnersspread acrossthe globe. The Edureka DevOps Certification Training coursehelps learners gain expertise in various DevOps processes an d tools such asPuppet, Jenkins, Ansible, Nagios and Git for automating multiple steps in SDLC.Recommended videos for you What is Git A Complete Git Tutorial For Beginners Watch Now Puppet Tutorial DevOps Tool For Configuration Management Watch Now DevOps-Redefining your IT Strategy Watch Now Top DevOps Interview Questions And Answers Watch Now DevOps Tutorial For Beginners Watch Now Ansible Tutorial For Beginners Ansible Playbook Watch Now Continuous Integration With Jenkins Watch Now Devops : Automate Your Infrastructure With Puppet Watch Now What is Docker DevOps Tool For Containerization Watch Now DevOps is Going to Replace SDLC! Learn Why Watch Now 5 Best Practices In DevOps Culture Watch Now What is DevOps A Beginners Guide To DevOps Watch Now What is Jenkins? Continuous Integration With Jenkins Watch NowRecommended blogs for you What Is Chef? A Tool Used For Configuration Management Read Article Top 20 Git Commands with Example Read Article Top Nagios Interview Questions For 2020- All You Need To Know About Nagios Read Article DevOps Engineer Resume Example Building An Impressive DevOps Resume Read Article What Is Ansible? Configuration Management And Automation With Ansible Read Article DevOps Roles: Which Of Them Is Your Dream? Read Article Kubernetes Networking A Comprehensive Guide To The Networking Concepts In Kubernetes Read Article Chef Tutorial Transform Infrastructure Into Code Read Article Git Submodules vs. Google’s Repo Tool Read Article Top Git Interview Questions You Need To Prepare In 2020 Read Article How To Install Kubernetes Cluster On Ubuntu 16.04 Read Article Top Chef Interview Questions All You Need To Know About Chef In 2020 Read Article DevOps Tutorial : Introduction To DevOps Read Article Secure Your Secrets With Ansible Vault Read Article Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deployment Read Article Azure DevOps Tutorial : Why Should You Use DevOps On Azure? Read Article What is Continuous Integration? Read Article Azure Boards: How To Get Started With Agile Planning on Azure? Read Article Ansible for AWS Managing Cloud Made Easy Read Article Install Docker Docker Installation On Ubuntu And CentOS Read Article Comments 7 Comments Trending Courses in DevOps DevOps Certification Training72k Enrolled LearnersWeekend/WeekdayLive Class Reviews 5 (28700)