Ansible is Awesome

Since a couple of weeks, I have started using Ansible and am amazed with its awesomeness. In this short duration, I automated a bunch of items, read about best practices and found a lot of batteries/community projects.

So, what really makes Ansible awesome?

Features:
- Agentless: Unlike Puppet, Chef or Saltstack, there is no need to run an agent on the clients
- Secure: Uses native SSH for all communications between master and client
- Scalable: ‘ansible-pull’ is an advanced feature which has potential for very large deployments
- Ansible Facts: Systems data, such as IP address, OS, Disk space, etc. are available by default in the form of variables. It makes custom configuration and cloud deployments super easy
- Ansible Playbooks: Playbooks are like ansible code, usually writen for orchestration. These are YML files - Powerful and easy to understand
- Role: Ansible framework for writing playbooks in an organized structure
Super Easy to get started:
- Installation:
  - Using PyPI: (env)$ pip install ansible
  - Pakage Manager: $ apt-get install ansible
- Hello world with ansible in just two steps:
  - $ echo "127.0.0.1" > ansible_hosts
  - $ ansible all -i ansible_hosts -m ping
Batteries Included - Ansible modules
Open-source project and under active development
Change management:
- Ansible is intellegent in making changes only if it is necessary. This means, when you ask ansible to install a software, it will install it only if it is not installed. It also provides a special register method to trap the result in a variable. This variable can later be used in conditional statements to act differently.

My playbooks written as per guidelines on best practices

Github repository: https://github.com/rohit01/ansible-playbooks. This project provides a basic layout for building configuration management system using Ansible.

Would love to hear your feedback in comments. And as always, Thanks for reading :-)