Ansible's Role in CI->CD
Ansible fits in a number of areas of the CI->CD implementation. It can be used for build environment provisioning, local workstation environment provisioning, configuration management on deployment servers, managing physical deployments, and much more.
In this section of Implementing DevOps with Ansible, we will take a look at where Ansible fits into the CI->CD pipeline implementation and some best practices associated with each implementation location. Before we begin looking into focus areas, let's identify the common steps in a CI->CD pipeline.
Initially, a delivery pipeline will be simple; it may contain a set of very basic steps. These steps might include the followng:
- Check out the source control when a change is committed.
- Perform a build or syntax check.
- Execute some unit tests.
- Report on the quality of the commit.
These steps are illustrated in the following diagram:
Based on the initial CI process described, we might consider using Ansible in the following...