Ansible Overview: Automating IT with Ease

August 17, 2025 šŸ‘©šŸ½ā€šŸ”¬ Letisia Pangata'a

Intermediate

What is Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source automation tool that enables IT professionals to automate configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration tasks across servers and cloud environments. Its agentless architecture and human-readable YAML syntax make it accessible for beginners and powerful for advanced users.


Why Use Ansible?

  • Agentless: No software needs to be installed on managed nodes—Ansible uses SSH or WinRM.
  • Simple Syntax: Playbooks are written in YAML, making them easy to read and write.
  • Idempotent: Tasks can be safely run multiple times without causing unintended changes.
  • Extensible: Supports modules for cloud, network, containers, and more.
  • Community Driven: A large ecosystem of roles, modules, and plugins.

Core Concepts

  • Inventory: A list of hosts (servers, VMs, containers) to manage, defined in an INI or YAML file.
  • Modules: Reusable scripts that perform tasks (e.g., install packages, copy files).
  • Playbooks: YAML files that define automation workflows as a series of tasks.
  • Roles: Organised collections of tasks, variables, files, and templates for reuse.
  • Variables & Templates: Customise behaviour and generate dynamic configuration files.

Example: A Simple Playbook

Below is a basic playbook to install Nginx on Ubuntu servers:

---
- name: Install Nginx on web servers
  hosts: web
  become: yes
  tasks:
    - name: Ensure Nginx is installed
      apt:
        name: nginx
        state: present

    - name: Ensure Nginx is running
      service:
        name: nginx
        state: started
        enabled: yes
---

How to Run Ansible

  1. Install Ansible:
    • On Debian/Ubuntu:
      sudo apt update
      sudo apt install ansible
      
    • Or via pip for cross-platform:
      pip install ansible   
      
  2. Create an inventory file (INI or YAML):
    [web]   
    server1.example.com   
    server2.example.com  
    
  3. Run a playbook:
    ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini nginx-playbook.yml   
    

Use Cases

  • Server provisioning and configuration management and configuration management
  • Application deployment and release automation nt and release automation
  • CI/CD integration and orchestration D integration and orchestration
  • Cloud resource provisioning (AWS, Azure, GCP) rovisioning (AWS, Azure, GCP)
  • Network automation and device configurationork automation and device configuration

Best Practices

  • Use roles to keep playbooks organised and reusable. to keep playbooks organised and reusable.
  • Secure secrets with Ansible Vault rather than storing plaintext credentials. - Secure secrets with Ansible Vault rather than storing plaintext credentials.
  • Test playbooks in a staging environment before applying to production. lying to production.
  • Keep inventories and playbooks in version control (Git). ol (Git).
  • Prefer idempotent tasks and explicit handlers for service restarts.handlers for service restarts.

Further Reading

  • Official docs: https://docs.ansible.com/ https://docs.ansible.com/
  • Community roles: https://galaxy.ansible.com/ - Community roles: https://galaxy.ansible.com/
  • Getting started guide: https://www.ansible.com/resources/get-startedces/get-started

Conclusion

Ansible provides a simple, agentless automation model that scales from small setups to large, complex infrastructures. Its readable YAML playbooks and extensible module ecosystem make it a strong choice for system administrators and DevOps teams aiming to automate reliably and reproducibly.

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