Using Ansible as IT Configuration Management and Orchestrations tool

Ansible

Ansible is the simple and best answer for configuration management at this time. It is designed and developed to be minimal in nature, consistent, highly reliable, secure, and with an extremely low learning curve for administrators and developers.

Ansible configurations are simple data descriptions of your infra ensuring everyone on your IT team will be able to understand the meaning and use of each configuration task.

A configuration system like Ansible is made up of several components. The systems which are managed consist of servers, storage, networking, and software, these are the main targets of the configuration management system. The primary focus is to maintain stability across systems. Another use case of this configuration management system is to maintain the desired state of the system. The third major aspect of a configuration management system is automation software, which simply means automating things and avoiding performing them manually.

PLAYBOOK

The whole configuration system works on a simple principle that is playbook. The playbook consists of every action we need to perform on our systems. It includes modules that perform the task on the remote server. 

Using Ansible as Configuration Tool 

Here we will see how ansible is used for Configuration using simple playbooks.

name: Playbook
    hosts: webservers
    become: yes
    become_user: root
    tasks:
      - name: apache version
        yum:
          name: httpd
          state: latest
      - name: ensure apache is running
        service:
          name: httpd
          state: started

Using ansible as an Orchestration tool

Ansible enables you to automate cloud deployments. We use ansible here to manage applications and services using playbooks. 

- hosts: localhost

  tasks:

     - ec2:

            aws_access_key: "My access key"

            aws_secret_key: "My secret key"

            key_name: mykey

            group: my-sg

            instance_type: t2.micro

            image: ami-i023####

            count: 1

            instance_tags:

                     name: my-instance

            monitoring: yes

            region: ap-south-1

            vpc_subnet_id: ####

            assign_public_ip: yes

Here is the sample playbook to deploy an instance in the AWS cloud.

So it sums up how we can use ansible for both Configuration Management and Orchestration tool.