Ansible

What is Ansible?

According to ansible.com:

“Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.”

To be a little more clear, and less sales pitchy, Ansible is an abstraction layer for python that IT professionals use to provision infrastructure, deploy applications, and manage services.

Ansible is agentless, meaning it doesn’t require anything be installed on the target device. Ansible connects to the device via secure shell and runs commands based on your intent. Using a simple and flexible standard (YAML), you create a codified intention. This intention is called a “Source Of Truth”.

Ansible is Free Open Source Software (FOSS), however, Ansible Tower is a specific product offered by RedHat for enterprise deployments of Ansible. It features a web interface, provides Role Based Access Controls (RBAC), enables Teams and Orgs, smart inventories and others.

• Open Source

• Python

• Primarily uses SSH

• Industry adoption

• Tower