What is Ansible?

Following the first industrial revolution, automation was introduced, making the already-efficient machinery that had been developed even more efficient. This led to the introduction of industrial constructions, vehicle steering and stabilization, and indoor environmental control, among many other developments. After this, the information revolution kicked in, initiating a new process of optimization. This phase is working to reduce human intervention in technological processes and raise productivity.

Nowadays, automation has become the norm across all fields. It started with simple administrator scripts, written to simplify and speed up daily tasks, and quickly developed into fully-fledged configuration management tools. The reasons behind this rapid development were the increase in market demand, the expansion of infrastructure and applications, and the emergence of new technologies, such as continuous integration, continuous development, and machine provisioning, that require a much more complicated setup and configuration.

By nature, systems and network administrators tend to want to reduce repetitive tasks, simplify complicated ones, and try to move on to the next task as quickly as possible. At first, there were a few simple scripts, such as Bash or PowerShell, that were able to optimize tasks in a standard environment. After that, longer and more complicated scripts that involved advanced programming languages such as Python or Ruby were developed. These aimed to address tasks across multiple platforms or in complex environments and to manage infrastructure using automation and orchestration tools, enabling businesses to grow dramatically overnight with more demanding and complicated services. The role of administrators is to manage this growth and act accordingly to ensure a seamless user experience. 

This chapter will provide an overview of Ansible. We will demonstrate that Ansible is now a must-have platform for managing a medium to large infrastructure, rather than having a physical, partially virtual or hybrid, private and public cloud. Other automation tools offer different benefits with regard to their installation, usage, speed, and flexibility, so it can be tricky for a first-time user to choose the most appropriate automation tool for their environment. Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and SaltStack are the major configuration management tools available on the market. Each of these follows a different method of deploying, configuring, and managing machines with reduced complexity and increased speed, reliability, and compliance. This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Market study of automation tools 
• Introduction to Ansible as a configuration management and task orchestration tool
• Exploration of Ansible's functionalities across operating systems, architectures, and cloud platforms
• Overview of the Ansible project and Tower