Why use Ansible?
Ansible is one of the most popular automation tools in the IT industry that helps in configuration of remote systems. This tool is often used to revolutionize the automation industry and deliver smooth and controlled function of services.
Continuous Delivery
In today’s trend of “release early, release often”, it often becomes difficult to keep up with a steady as well as easy means of performing functions. This is particularly crucial when human interaction at multiple levels of technical expertise is at play.
Ansible provides a wonderful opportunity to perform tasks in several systems at the same time remotely. This is important to note that it is often required to group these several thousand systems into distinct groups, for example blue and green nomenclature, yet cater to hundreds in these groups at the same time.
Another crucial factor is the idempotent nature of the tool. Ansible provides its users with plays which are a set of systems mentioned as hosts and a set of tasks to be performed on these systems referred to as managed nodes. Often it saves time and resources if these tasks are not repeated multiple times in some nodes. Hence providing a easier and efficient means to handle functions in the respective nodes.
Ansible playbooks are written in YAML language which is a very easy means of specifying the tasks and do not need much technical expertise. Alongside, the Ansible documentation ,here, also acts a wealth f information with regards to various modules pertaining to the tasks.
One common way to use Ansible is by calling it from a continuous integration (CI) system upon a successful application build. A very popular use of the CI/CD pipelines using Ansible is found in Jenkins.