Ansible — Everywhere !

Karthik Avula
3 min readDec 3, 2020

Hi everyone, welcome to the blog on knowing how, why and where we need Ansible.

What exactly is Ansible ?

As techies, we all know how to configure many services or clusters. What if we can do all the configurations mostly the intelligent configurations ( we don’t need to know how to do and where to do, we just need what to do ! ) in a single click ! Thats what Ansible is.

Ansible is an Automation tool. What do I mean by automation ? It can be any one of Infrastructure Automation, Cloud Automation, Security Automation, Application Automation, many other !! Ansible simplifies it. With Ansible you can configure Routers, Clusters, Webservers, Applications, Docker and anything.

Ansible is an agentless automation tool which means that clients dont need to install the Ansible tool. All Ansible do is setups a ssh connection(in most cases) between Controller Node and simplifies everything on a Target Node.

Ansible Connection Architecture

Ansible connection architecture

Ansible is a tool built on python. Ansible maintains a directory of IPs in a file called as inventory file and this file contains all the data which is needed for a connection like IP, username, password, connection type.

Anything you need to configure with Ansible, we can do it in 2 ways that can either using ad-hoc commands or a playbook in which mutliple ad-hoc commands are set as plays and run anytime you want. In both the way, you need to use modules and arguments.

Ansible for DevOps

Many companies like Cisco, Dell, Juniper, Nokia, Hewlett Packard Enterprise uses Ansible as their DevOps tool. DevOps is something like How fast and effecient your environment is created and ready to use ! For these many companies are following Redhat’s Ansible which is free and simple.

Avi Networks:

Ansible in the companies like Avi Networks is used for CI/CD Pipelines which enables Efficient, repeatable, and automated app provisioning, Speed and Accuracy.

Dell Networking:

The Ansible modules and collections for Dell EMC Networking solutions allow organizations to use open-source tools such as Ansible to minimize costly engineering overhead and help reduce the time and effort required to design, provision and manage networks in the following ways:

  • Agentless: No new software to install on Dell EMC PowerSwitch devices
  • Powerful: End-to-end automation of configuration from bare metal switches using zero-touch deployment features
  • Easy: The Ansible collections for Dell EMC Networking solutions contain everything you need, including examples of playbooks, to start working with
  • Best Practices: The Ansible collections for Dell EMC Networking solutions are validated and certified by RedHat
  • Flexible: Full support of Ansible model for Networking: command, configuration and facts

You can see more details on how Ansible helps industries to automate their things and how they get Solution Benefits from Ansible you can read official blog of Redhat’s Ansible with this link

Thanks for reading my blog. Hope you all loved this blog and I will come up next time with an another exciting blog.

This blog I have written, is a part of my journey in ARTH — The School of Technologies

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Karthik Avula

CS Student. Skillset : Linux, Bash Shell Scripting, Python, AWS, Hadoop, Ansible, Docker, Kuberntes, Networking and Troubleshooting, OS Concepts.