Installing, Configuring, and Running Ansible

Ansible is a relatively new addition to the DevOps and Configuration Management ecosystem. Its radical simplicity, structured automation format, and no brainer development paradigm has caught the eyes of both corporations and startups alike. Organizations such as Twitter have managed to successfully leverage Ansible for highly scaled deployments and Configuration Management implementations across, and have scaled it to manage and deploy to thousands of servers simultaneously. Twitter isn't the only player within the Ansible space that has managed to leverage Ansible at scale; other well-known organizations that have successfully leveraged Ansible include Logitech, NASA, NEC, Microsoft, and hundreds more.

As it stands today, Ansible is in use by some of the largest and well known technology companies and organizations around the world, and is responsible for managing thousands of deployments and maintaining the Configuration Management solutions for countless organizations. Learning the fundamentals of the Ansible solution will provide us with the tools we will need to properly install, configure and run Ansible at small and large scales.

In this chapter, we will formally introduce you to Ansible. Together we will learn how to install it, dive into its run-time architectures, and learn how to configure it to run simple automation sequences. In addition to these topics, we will cover the basics of the Ansible control server under Ubuntu Linux and learn how Ansible can be leveraged for local executions as well as remote management. Finally in this chapter, we will cover the basic concept of a playbook and discover the underlying constructs behind what makes Ansible so powerful. The goals for this chapter will be to grasp the following:

• Installing Ansible
• The Ansible Architecture
• The Ansible Command Line Interface
• Configuring Ansible
• The Ansible Inventory

Now that we have the introductions out of the way let's get started!