Ansible

Ansible is an open source project, framework, and automation platform. Its descriptive automation language has captured the attention of many network engineers who see it as an introduction with minimal friction into the world of network automation and something that can help them become productive relatively quickly.

Ansible has an agentless push-based architecture. It connects to the hosts it manages via SSH and runs a series of tasks. These tasks are small programs that we call Ansible modules, which are the units of code that Ansible abstracts away from the user. A user only has to give the input arguments and can rely on Ansible modules to do all the heavy work for them. Although the level of abstraction may vary, Ansible modules allow users to focus more on the desired state of their infrastructure and less on the individual commands required to achieve that state.

Overview of Ansible components

Playbooks are at the core of Ansible. These text-based declarative...