5 Key Characteristics Of Ansible Software

Ansible needs no introduction in the world of software development. It is an open source automation platform devised for automation as well as centralized management of configuration procedures.

Apart from task automation and configuration management, this easy-to-set-up yet powerful software can help you with application deployment as well.

It is available for free and runs on multiple platforms including Mac, Linux or BSD. Apart from the free offering, Ansible also has an enterprise product known as Ansible Tower.

Why Learn Ansible?

Being an incredibly simple IT automation platform, Ansible has the power to make your applications and systems much easier to deploy. Doing an Ansible course from a reputed institute can help you avoid custom codes or writing scripts to deploy and update your applications.

As an automation tool, Ansible helps in establishing and maintaining consistency of product performance as it records and updates comprehensive information describing the hardware and software of enterprise.

Ansible certification can also help you learn the following:

• Write Ansible configuration playbooks to deploy a multi-tier web application.

• Configure Ansible roles with files, tasks, templates, handlers, and default variables.

• Writing operational playbooks to be able to check cluster status and perform a cluster restart.

• How to optimize Ansible playbooks to reduce playbook execution time.

• Introduction to YAML and how to build Ansible inventory files.

• Basics of automating provisioning and web server deployment.

Top 5 Characteristics Of Ansible

Some of the key characteristics of Ansible include:

1. Compatible with Python

Unlike other competing solutions that are built with complex and redundant languages such as Ruby, Ansible is written in Python, one of the robust programming languages. Being compatible with Python makes it easier to run because of the fact that Python libraries are present on most Linux distributions by default.

Although Ansible modules for extending the tool’s functionality can be written in any programming language till the time it returns data in JSON format, being written in Python makes it more popular as Python is the most common language for administrators and system engineers.

2. No need of any agents

Ansible doesn’t use an agent on the remote host. It handles all the master/agent communications with either standard SSH or the Paramiko module (Python implementation of the SSH2) for managing nodes.

The fact that the tool doesn’t require any agents to be installed on remote systems to be managed translates to cost saving because of much less maintenance overhead and performance degradations.

3. Modules

Modules and plugins are other key characteristics of Ansible. These Modules are like small programs that Ansible sends from a control machine to all the nodes or remote hosts. Ansible executes all the modules for either installing updates and then removes them when the required task is finished. Ansible provides more than 400 such modules for common tasks.

The modules in Ansible are executed using playbooks and they control various things such as files, services, and package.

4. Powerful Ansible Playbooks

Ansible is well- known for its powerful Playbooks which are nothing but the detailed instructions manual telling Ansible what to do when it is connected to any machine.

These Ansible Playbooks are written in YAML, which could be simply viewed as XML but are human readable.

When the Playbook is fired off, Ansible will install and configure the web server to make sure that your database server allows connections from the new server and ask to network monitoring solution for intimating in case of any system failures.

5. Robust, security and compliance

Ansible is a powerful software known not just for application deployment but for site-wide security policies as well. Be it firewall rules or locking down users, it can be easily implemented along with other automated processes.

Even if you configure the security details on the control machine and run the playbooks associated with it, all the remote hosts will automatically be updated with those details. It means that Ansible security does not require you to manually monitor each machine for security.

Get Ansible Certified Now

There is no doubt about the fact that Ansible is a must-have in your CV as a software professional.

The fact that almost every company nowadays is trying to automate all  processes to increase the overall productivity and efficiency of the application and resources, learning Ansible can be extremely beneficial.

If you have a good knowledge of an automation tool like Ansible with other skills such as writing playbooks to automate complex tasks, you will definitely be seen as an asset for your organization and do exceptionally well in your career.