Ansible - 1 - 2 Introduction

System administrators, IT engineers and anyone working in operations spend a huge part of their time repeating the same tasks: spinning up virtual machines, patching hundreds of servers, applying configuration changes, running compliance audits and migrations. Each of those activities means running dozens of commands in the right order, on the right hosts, sometimes followed by reboots. Many teams end up maintaining their own collection of homemade scripts, which require coding skills and constant upkeep.

Ansible is the answer to that pain. It is a powerful IT automation tool that you can learn quickly and that scales from a single VM to fleets of thousands of servers. Anyone in IT can pick it up — you do not need to be a developer to express even complex deployments in a few lines of YAML inside what Ansible calls a playbook.

What Ansible can orchestrate

• Restart a fleet of servers in a precise order — for instance database servers first, web servers next — by invoking a single playbook.
• Provision virtual machines on public clouds like AWS or on private cloud environments such as VMware.
• Configure operating systems and applications: edit files, install packages, manage services and firewall rules.
• Integrate with external systems: pull host lists from a CMDB, fire tickets in ITSM tools, trigger jobs from monitoring platforms.

Hundreds of built-in modules ship with Ansible to cover all of those tasks. The official documentation hosted on the Ansible docs site is comprehensive and includes ready-to-copy playbooks for the most common scenarios. The combination of a simple language, a huge module library and an agentless architecture explains why Ansible is so popular in modern IT operations.

That is it for the introduction — in the next videos we will get our hands dirty by setting up a lab environment and writing our first commands and playbooks.