With the rapid growth of IT infrastructures and a shift in the way applications are being deployed, IT administrators' tasks have grown in scale and complexity. Ansible seamlessly merges orchestration and configuration management in a very handy platform that allows IT administrators to define a selected number of nodes, applications, and network devices to be configured in a desired state by making clear which actions should be taken to remove repetition and reduce complexity. Ansible can be used in a variety of ways, which we will cover in the next section.
As well as configuration management, Ansible also offers high-end orchestration. This makes the organization and management of the interactions between multiple configuration tasks well-structured. It simplifies and orders complex and chaotic configuration management and administration tasks. According to the status of the infrastructure, and the users' demands, applications, and data-versioned behaviors, Ansible orchestration will generally bring the infrastructure back to the desired state by configuring the appropriate services and policies via the CM tool into the failed component and make it work properly.
IT orchestration can get very complex when dealing with DevOps class tasks, such as the continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) of applications or infrastructure as a code (IaC). Ansible is capable of converting those tasks to automated workflows that run a number of playbooks in a well-defined structure, featuring all sorts of Ansible pre-defined modules, plugins, and APIs to communicate, execute commands, and report facts from any number of hosts, devices, and services.
Ansible is the path to take for better infrastructure automation, application deployment, and provisioning. It is the open source approach to an automated and modernized IT environment. Ansible is the key to enabling IT administrators to automate their daily tasks, freeing up their time to allow them to focus on delivering quality services. This not only impacts the IT department, but the business as a whole. The following diagram shows the reach of Ansible's multiple functionalities:
Instance provisioning using Ansible covers the configuration and setup of bare-metal machines and servers. It relies on its predefined APIs to create and configure the local virtualized infrastructure. It can also manage hybrid, private, and public cloud instances, resources, and applications. Ansible can automatically install and configure an application and its libraries. It uses OS bootstrap and a kickstart script to initiate bare-metal machine provisioning using very simple playbooks and built-in modules. Using the same simple playbooks and different modules, Ansible can also provision instances, networking, and VMs in a public, private, or hybrid cloud very easily.
Using the power of playbooks and inventory, IT administrators can use Ansible to execute an update, patch, or configuration modification on a number of hosts, network devices, and applications. Playbooks describe the infrastructure in both simple, human-readable terms for other people to use, and machine-parsable code that can be used on any machine running Ansible. The execution of an Ansible configuration is state-driven, which means that it does not need to check the system or service state to know how to adapt in order to increase the task's reliability.
When we talk about applications that are managed by Ansible, we are talking about full life cycle control. Any users who have access to the Ansible server node, from IT administrators to application developers and project managers, will be able to manage all aspects of the application. Ansible takes the application package, deploys it to all the production servers, sets it up, and configures and initiates it. It can even test the package and report its status. This feature covers multi-tier applications, allowing zero-downtime rolling for a seamless application update.
Ansible ensures a stable environment for both developers and IT administrators for the continuous delivery and integration of applications. Automating as much as possible of the application turnaround means it is quick and unnoticeable to the application users. Ansible automation and orchestration is multi-tier and multi-step, which allows for finer control over operations and hosts. We can write Playbooks to manage the continuous integration and delivery of applications while ensuring the desired state of various components, such as load balancers and several server nodes.