With the exponential
growth of IT industries around the globe, it’s becoming increasingly difficult
to manually keep track of all development tasks. Automation adds efficiency to
your company allowing your developers to concentrate their efforts where it
matters the most.
What is Ansible?
Ansible is an
automation tool created for the sole purpose of handling redundant that would
otherwise slow down your development cycle. The automation tool is used in IT
services such as application deployment, management, provisioning, and inter service
orchestration. In times of quickly scaling IT industries and their ever-increasing
complexity of work, Ansible is like Moses created to shepherd the hapless sheep
of through the valley of IT development.
Ansible offers the following advantages:
·
Since Ansible is an open-source tool,
it’s completely free.
·
Its powerful infrastructure allows you
to carve out highly complex workflows with relative ease.
·
You don’t need hacker level coding
experience to use Ansible playbooks. They are easy to learn and relatively
easier to operate.
·
It's flexible in its use, letting you
customize it from anywhere you want.
·
You don’t have to install any extra
software which gives you all the room you want for your application and other
resources on the server.
·
You don’t need any management structure,
no firewalls, client systems, or anything else. Ansible handles everything
there is to the automation process.
Features of Ansible:
· Application Deployment
Ansible
paves the way for quick and easy deployment of multitier apps, no custom code
required. You don’t have to write a code for every system. Just write a
playbook and run it every time you want Ansible to achieve similar results. It
will figure out how to get the desired result from your system and it does so
by communicating with remote hosts with the help of an SSH(Secure Socket
Shell).
· Security details
Long
gone are the days when you had to manually monitor the security detail across
all your machines. With Ansible, you just run a playbook and all your remote
hosts will be updated with the new security patch.
· Orchestration
There
are a lot of stages to application development and Ansible is able to handle
them single-handedly. For instance, while developing an app you need to manage
databases, storage, network, instances and so on. Ansible employs automated
workflows with the help of playbooks. After inscribing your desired
infrastructure in a playbook, simply run it and the whole process will be
automated. You can also use the same pipeline wherever you want(inside Ansible)
since it is already predefined as a playbook.
· Ansible architecture
This
includes other peripherals such as modules, plugins, and inventories. However,
the most important of them all is Playbooks. They are written YAML and act as
instruction manuals for specific automated tasks.
However,
the one thing that’s truly unique about Ansible is the Playbooks. You can
design tasks according to your desired tasks without the need for complicated
syntaxes and commands.
Each
playbook comprises multiple plays each mapping a group of hosts to various
roles represented by tasks you want to run on your application.
Ansible is a very
efficient way of optimizing your online cloud computing space. It's free,
powerful easy to use and offers custom builds letting you do accomplish tasks
that would take otherwise hours to complete.
