What is Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source automation tool, or platform, used for IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, intra service orchestration, and provisioning. Automation is crucial these days, with IT environments that are too complex and often need to scale too quickly for system administrators and developers to keep up if they had to do everything manually. Automation simplifies complex tasks, not just making developers’ jobs more manageable but allowing them to focus attention on other tasks that add value to an organization. In other words, it frees up time and increases efficiency. And Ansible, as noted above, is rapidly rising to the top in the world of automation tools. Let’s look at some of the reasons for Ansible’s popularity.

Advantages of Ansible

Free: Ansible is an open-source tool.

Very simple to set up and use: No special coding skills are necessary to use Ansible’s playbooks (more on playbooks later).

Powerful: Ansible lets you model even highly complex IT workflows.

Flexible: You can orchestrate the entire application environment no matter where it’s deployed. You can also customize it based on your needs.

Agentless: You don’t need to install any other software or firewall ports on the client systems you want to automate. You also don’t have to set up a separate management structure.

Efficient: Because you don’t need to install any extra software, there’s more room for application resources on your server.