Since the last couple of year, there has been lots of work done in order to simplify and ease off OpenIO configuration management and deployment. In order to do this without many hassles, companies use Ansible that is more than a boon to them. Ansible can simplify and automate complex, repetitive and tedious tasks. Users love to use it as it brings in time savings whenever you install packages or configure the largest numbers of servers. Read on to find why it is worth to get Ansible certification.
The architecture of Ansible is effective and user-friendly. Ansible works by connecting to your nodes and then pushes all the small programs to them. These programs make the system comply with a state and as the tasks are completed, they’re deleted. Ansible works over SSH and it doesn’t need any daemons, servers or libraries to work. A command line tool and a text editor are enough to get things done.
All you have to do is to describe your infrastructure through a text file and then the information regarding the state of the machine is organized through playbooks. They gather node information into so-called facts. All the tasks are done in a language that is readable by humans and can be read by even those who know nothing on coding.
The benefits of Ansible
There are at least three benefits that can make Ansible one of your most favorite tools. Here are the 3 noteworthy advantages:
- Ansible is agentless: You don’t need to install any other software on the server nodes. This will maintain a clean installation while making sure that there aren’t any conflicts with the software.
- Playbooks are easy to edit and read: They are written in YAML and this is one of the greatest benefits as compared to other alternatives like Puppet.
- Ansible is written in Python which is a popular programming language familiar among engineers.
There is also another reason behind its popularity – it is open source. However, this is one of the most common features for this kind of tool. Therefore it is not a huge differentiator.
If you compare Ansible with other tools, it offers one more benefit. It is not procedural but is declarative. This will mean that you have to write a description of the ultimate condition of the machine and it will take all the required steps to fulfill this description. You can apply playbooks many times and only the important steps are applied without any kind of side-effects.
User-friendly nature of Ansible
When we say that Ansible is user-friendly, we really mean it. It can be read and edited very easily to reflect all you needs. With this tool, you can overcome all the impediments by other tools and build playbooks that can be run either for one or for hundreds of nodes. This drastically speeds up deployments and also makes sure that noone is tampered with those single nodes.
There are Ansible certification courses offered for beginners that will help you get started with installing Ansible 2.0. The course will also guide you through your own playbooks and manage the cloud region.