DevOps Ansible Tool
by -SANDEEP KUMAR PATEL
https://github.com/Ersandeep977/Ansible_basics_playbook
ANSIBLE TOOL
Ansible is a software tool that provides simple but powerful automation for cross-platform computer support. It is primarily intended for IT professionals, who use it for application deployment, updates on workstations and servers, cloud provisioning, configuration management, intra-service orchestration, and nearly anything a systems administrator does on a weekly or daily basis. Ansible doesn’t depend on agent software and has no additional security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy.
Because Ansible is all about automation, it requires instructions to accomplish each job. With everything written down in simple script form, it’s easy to do version control. The practical result of this is a major contribution to the “infrastructure as code” movement in IT: the idea that the maintenance of server and client infrastructure can and should be treated the same as software development, with repositories of self-documenting, proven, and executable solutions capable of running an organization regardless of staff changes.
While Ansible may be at the forefront of automation, systems administration, and DevOps, it’s also useful to everyday users. Ansible allows you to configure not just one computer, but potentially a whole network of computers at once, and using it requires no programming skills. Instructions written for Ansible are human-readable. Whether you’re entirely new to computers or an expert, Ansible files are easy to understand
What is Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?
Ansible Automation Platform provides an enterprise framework for building and operating IT automation at scale. Users can centralize and control their infrastructure with a visual dashboard, role-based access control, and automation tools including analytics and certified, reusable content.
Ansible Automation Platform’s human-readable YAML automation language makes it possible for users across an organization to share, vet, and manage automation content. Collaborate across teams and get up and running quickly with searchable collections of pre-composed roles and modules so anyone can create automation.
Ansible is a Python-dependent configuration-management software, where both the controlling node and the target machine must have Python and its dependent packages installed. Ansible does not require a single controlling machine where orchestration begins Ansible works against multiple systems in your infrastructure by selecting portions of Ansible’s inventory, stored as edit-able, version-able ASCII text files. The inventory is configurable, and target machine inventory can be sourced dynamic or cloud-based sources or different formats (YAML, INI, etc.).The absence of a central-server requirement simplifies disaster-recovery planning. Nodes are managed by this controlling machine — typically over SSH. The controlling machine describes the location of nodes through its inventory. Sensitive data can be stored in encrypted files using Ansible Vault since 2014. In contrast with other popular configuration-management software — such as Chef, Puppet, and CFEngine — Ansible uses an agentless architecture, with Ansible software not normally running or even installed on the controlled node. Instead, Ansible orchestrates a node by installing and running modules on the node temporarily via SSH. For the duration of an orchestration task, a process running the module communicates with the controlling machine with a JSON-based protocol via its standard input and output. When Ansible is not managing a node, it does not consume resources on the node because no daemons are executing or software installed
How To Install and Configure Ansible -
While there are many popular configuration management tools available for Linux systems, such as Chef and Puppet, these are often more complex than many people want or need. Ansible is a great alternative to these options because it offers an architecture that doesn’t require special software to be installed on nodes, using SSH to execute the automation tasks and YAML files to define provisioning details.
Prerequisites
One Ansible Control Node: The Ansible control node is the machine we’ll use to connect to and control the Ansible hosts over SSH. Your Ansible control node can either be your local machine or a server dedicated to running Ansible, though this guide assumes your control node is an Ubuntu 20.04 system. Make sure the control node
One or more Ansible Hosts: An Ansible host is any machine that your Ansible control node is configured to automate. This guide assumes your Ansible hosts are remote Ubuntu 20.04 servers. Make sure each Ansible host has
Step 1 — Installing Ansible
To begin using Ansible as a means of managing your server infrastructure, you need to install the Ansible software on the machine that will serve as the Ansible control node. We’ll use the default Ubuntu repositories for that.
First, refresh your system’s package index with:
sudo apt updateFollowing this update, you can install the Ansible software with:
sudo apt install ansiblePress Y when prompted to confirm installation.
Your Ansible control node now has all of the software required to administer your hosts. Next, we’ll go over how to set up an inventory file, so that Ansible can communicate with your managed nodes.
Step 2 — Setting Up the Inventory File
The inventory file contains information about the hosts you’ll manage with Ansible. You can include anywhere from one to several hundred servers in your inventory file, and hosts can be organized into groups and subgroups. The inventory file is also often used to set variables that will be valid only for specific hosts or groups, in order to be used within playbooks and templates. Some variables can also affect the way a playbook is run, like the ansible_python_interpreter variable that we’ll see in a moment.
To edit the contents of your default Ansible inventory, open the /etc/ansible/hosts file using your text editor of choice, on your Ansible control node:
sudo nano /etc/ansible/hosts
Step 3 — Testing Connection
After setting up the inventory file to include your servers, it’s time to check if Ansible is able to connect to these servers and run commands via SSH.
For this guide, we’ll be using the Ubuntu root account because that’s typically the only account available by default on newly created servers. If your Ansible hosts already have a regular sudo user created, you are encouraged to use that account instead
ansible all -m ping -u root
