Ansible is an open-source tool backed by Redhat’s since twenty fifteen that gives you the ability to control and configure multiple servers from one single location so instead of having to go into each server and manually configuring them, you can automate all of your tasks.
For example, if you’ve tried configuring a database before you know that it involves a few different steps, number one you have to install the database system then you have to set up a user name and password with the correct user permissions and then finally you have to configure your application to connect to your newly created database. Now you can figure out all the stops once in ansible and then you can run them countless times in exactly the same way this is huge for reducing the potential of human error while letting your skills quickly to handle demand and automate application deployments now there are alternatives to ansible such as Puppet, Chef and Saltstack but ansible is oftentimes regarded as a simpler tool to use which can be very attractive for beginners. Why is this important you ask well because it uses YAML to describe your automation jobs which is very easy to learn because it looks a lot like plain English is also lightweight which means it doesn’t require a lot of computer resources to run and for example as well only requires SSH access to run commands on the server is that it manages compared to the alternative tools which require that you install feature on all the servers in order to communicate with them now what’s great is that ansible has a free version available but if you need access to more advanced features there is a paid version of ansible that provides you with features like ansible dashboard with real-time monitoring smoky flavor for flows scheduling jobs and others but there’s even more that we couldn’t possibly cover in this quick article, kindly refer the official Ansible document page for further information.
