Ansible Definition

“Ansible is an open-source automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment.[3] Once installed on a control node, Ansible, which is an agentless architecture, connects to a managed node through the default OpenSSH connection type.”
- Wikipedia

Ansible Background

• developed by Michael DeHaan, 2013 founding of AnsibleWorks Inc. -> Ansible Inc.
• owned by Red Hat Inc. (October 2015)
• developed with Python
• runs on all UNIX based OS (Linux, OSX, AIX ...)
• support for Windows with Powershell 3.0 (winrm)

What is the point?

“Using Ansible, we’ve been able to cut down certain processes
from 17 hours to 3 minutes.
Ansible is unquantifiable in its benefit.”
- Branden Faulls, FATMAP

Is there more?

• Infrastructure as Code
  
  • committed to GitHub
• Accessible to others
  • use it on their own servers
• Auditable & Documentable
  • can see the history of changes

Context - Ansible Use Cases

This is DevOps!

• Provisioning
• Configuration Management
• App Deployment
• Continuous Delivery
• Security & Compliance
• Orchestration

App Deployment

• deploy multi-tier applications
  reliably & consistently
• all from one common framework
• push application artifacts from one common system

Continuous Delivery

• CI asks Ansible to run a Playbook that deploys a staging environment with the application
• run a production deployment after stage tests pass
• check out artifacts from VCS on each machine