Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Ansible Journey 1: Introduction

The author of the video series states that the purpose of Ansible is to provision hosts. I view Ansible as having that capability, but with a more general purpose. In my view, Ansible is an automation tool. Does it provision hosts? Yes, and that is a great use-case. More generally, Ansible provides a means of automating tasks that go far beyond simple provisioning.


Consider a situation in which one of your services go down. You have a secondary host that can provide the same service, but in a standby configuration. When the service goes down, you need a way to detect that, and bring the service up on the standby host, with no human involvement. This is where Ansible shines. By automating the process of bringing up the service on the standby host with Ansible, you have a fail-over solution that works whether you are in the office, or in bed.


There are two types of hosts I’ll be using: the Ansible host, and the client. Unlike other solutions (Chef, Puppet, etc.) there is no client utility required to receive inbound Ansible requests. Ansible relies completely on SSH for connectivity, and issuing commands.


I will use a single host (rocky_1) as the Ansible host. This server has the Ansible package installed. It will contain all of the files required to manage target hosts, including the configurations, inventories, and groups of commands (playbooks). I also have two target hosts (rocky_2 and rocky_3) that will be configured from the Ansible host.

 

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