What is an Ansible?

An ansible is a category of fictional device or technology capable of instantaneous or superluminal (faster than light) communication. It can send and receive messages to and from a corresponding device over any distance or obstacle whatsoever with no delay.

- Wikipedia, 2017-04-28

What is Ansible?

• An agentless Python based IT automation, configuration management, and deployment tool that by default operates in an ordered manner.
  • does not have a 'client' to install on remote machines
  • does have Python library dependencies
  • can run in an ad-hoc mode
  • can run against single servers, predefined groups of servers, or subset/supersets of servers
  • does operations synchronously in the order they are configured (by default)

Agentless

• No agent required on client machines
• Works through SSH / Powershell

Automation

• Run commands against a single machine
• Run commands against a 'class' of machines
  • /etc/ansible/hosts
  • use a different inventory file with '-i filename'
• Playbooks

Configuration Management

• Other tool options
  • Puppet
  • Chef
  • Salt
• Provisioning new Machines
• Changes to existing machines

Ordered Operations

• Changes applied in same order as presented in playbook
• Dependencies can be difficult
  • ignore_errors
• Idempotency

Adhoc Commands

• run a single command

• ansible groupname -m mode -a "args"

• Default mode is 'shell'
• Example

Modes

• setup
• ​shell
• copy
• file
• user
• service
• mysql_user
• etc... see Ansible docs under 'Module Index'