Understanding Ansible
Ansible is an open source piece of software used to make IT automation simple and offers automation for everyone. Ansible is a tool used for configuration management, software provisioning, and application deployment. It's a powerful tool that offers many features. These features include the following:
- It can run locally on the host or guest machine
- It has an extensive plugin ecosystem
- It can orchestrate infrastructure using many cloud providers
- It can be installed on many different operating systems
- It has simple inventory management
- It has simple and powerful automation with Playbooks
- Well-written and extensive documentation
Ansible offers a minimal approach to provisioning your software with an easy to learn syntax and is built to be reliable and secure. We'll learn more about Ansible as we work through this chapter by installing it, creating and testing Playbooks, and provisioning a Vagrant machine.
Some more interesting facts about Ansible are that it is part of Red Hat...