Automation Using Ansible

Introduction to Ansible

Ansible is an open source tool which serves for configuration management, orchestration, provisioning and deployments. It is developed using python and runs on Windows, Mac, and UNIX-like systems. The Ansible itself is agentless i.e you don't need to install any client side software.It uses SSH connections. Hence,if you have well-oiled SSH setup, then you are roll up to use ansible in your environment. This also means that you can install it on only one machine and control your infrastructure from that machine itself.

ManageIQ and Ansible

Before ease of Ansible reached out to us, one was expected to be quite comfortable with Ruby scripting language and Automate model to develop his own automation scripts. But, Now ManageIQ do provide various provisioning and service management processes. Thus, after Fine release, we can use Ansible playbooks for automation.

Ansible Terms

Modules

Ansible modules are reusable scripts that is used by Ansible or Ansible-playbooks. They do return information to ansible by printing a JSON string to stdout before exiting.

Playbooks

Playbooks are Ansible’s configuration, deployment, and orchestration modelling language. Each playbook is composed of one or more plays in a list, and a play maps a group of hosts to one or more well defined roles or tasks.

Roles

Roles provide Ansible with a way to load tasks, handlers, and variables from external files, based on a known file structure.

Inventory

An inventory defines a list of managed hosts that Ansible jobs can be run against. Inventories can contain groups which further sub-divide hosts into logical collections of systems.

Job and Job Template

A job is an instance of Ansible Tower launching a playbook against an inventory of hosts.

A job template is a definition and set of parameters for running an Ansible Tower job. Job templates allow us to execute the same job many times, by pre-defining such items as the playbook to run, extra variables to pass, inventory to be managed, and credentials that should be used.

Ruby and Ansible

Ansible is the quite simple and can read its YAML-formatted playbooks. Automation can be done by both from Ansible playbooks from Automate and developing own Ruby automation scripts. Ruby methods allow us to access and manipulate all of the objects and their properties within the VMDB. But it requires thorough understanding of Ruby scripting language and the Automate object model to start developing own automation scripts.