Ansible is an open-source IT automation engine that can remove drudgery from your work life, dramatically improving the scalability, consistency, and reliability of your IT environment. This guide will explore how to automate repetitive system administration tasks using Ansible. For more in-depth learning, Cloud Academy offers an Introduction to Ansible learning path.
What is Ansible and what can it automate?
Ansible can automate three types of tasks:
- Provisioning: Set up the various servers you need in your infrastructure.
- Configuration management: Change the configuration of an application, OS, or device; start and stop services; install or update applications; implement a security policy; or perform a wide variety of other configuration tasks.
- Application deployment: Make DevOps easier by automating the deployment of internally developed applications to your production systems.
Ansible can automate IT environments hosted on traditional bare metal servers, virtualization platforms, or in the cloud. It can also automate the configuration of a wide range of systems and devices such as …