Ansible Overview: Automating IT with Ease
August 17, 2025 š©š½āš¬ Letisia Pangata'a
IntermediateWhat 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 nodesāAnsible 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
- Install Ansible:
- On Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt update sudo apt install ansible
- Or via pip for cross-platform:
pip install ansible
- On Debian/Ubuntu:
- Create an inventory file (INI or YAML):
[web] server1.example.com server2.example.com
- 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.