What is Ansible and How to Use Ansible in Docker

 What is Ansible and How to Use Ansible in Docker

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows.

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 later).

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.

Agentless: You don’t need to install any other software or firewall ports on the client systems you want to automate. You also don’t have to set up a separate management structure.

Efficient: Because you don’t need to install any extra software, there’s more room for application resources on your server.

Ansible Features:

1. Configuration Management

Ansible is designed to be very simple, reliable, and consistent for configuration management. If you’re already in IT, you can get up and running with it very quickly. 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.

2. Application Deployment

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.

3. Orchestration

As the name suggests, orchestration involves bringing different elements into a beautifully run whole operation similar to the way a musical conductor brings the notes produced by all the different instruments into a cohesive artistic work. For example, with application deployment, you need to manage not just the front-end and backend services but the databases, networks, storage, and so on. You also need to make sure that all the tasks are handled in the proper order.

4. Security and Compliance

As with application deployment, site wide security policies (such as firewall rules or locking down users) can be implemented along with other automated processes. If you configure the security details on the control machine and run the associated playbook, all the remote hosts will automatically be updated with those details. That means you won’t need to monitor each machine for security compliance continually manually.

5. Cloud Provisioning

The first step in automating your applications’ life cycle is automating the provisioning of your infrastructure. With Ansible, you can provision cloud platforms, virtualized hosts, network devices, and bare-metal servers.

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