What is Ansible and How it works?

What is Ansible?

Ansible is a cross-platform Configuration Management Tool for Server(s), which is primarily written using python.

Benefits of Ansible

The benefits are as follows:

  • It is easy to learn, understand and use which makes it the choice for server config management
  • It is Idempotent, that is, there are no additional effect if it is called more than once with the same input parameters.
  • It is Platform Independent.
  • Ansible-Command prompt is free.

Architecture of Ansible

The above image is a simple architecture of Ansible where the users interact with the ACS(Ansible Control Server) which in turn interacts with the ARS(Ansible Remote Server). In this architecture, there can be a number of Remote servers (windows, linux or any other) and a single ACS (Linux, 64 bit). The ACS uses SSH to interact with Linux ARSs and HTTP(winrm) to interact with Windows ARSs.