Understanding the Fundamentals of Ansible

At its heart, Ansible is a simple framework that pushes a small program called an Ansible module to target nodes. Modules are at the heart of Ansible and are responsible for performing all of the automation’s hard work. The Ansible framework goes beyond this, however, and also includes plugins and dynamic inventory management, as well as tying all of this together with playbooks to automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, network automation, and much more, as shown:

Figure 2.1 – The typical flow and usage of Ansible’s automation engine

Even with the addition of Ansible collections since the previous release of this book, this architecture remains unchanged – now, the modules, plugins, and dynamic inventory scripts are simply distributed through collections whereas before everything was distributed as part of the Ansible release itself.

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