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Ansible

Radically simple configuration-management, application deployment, task-execution, and multi-node orchestration engine

What is Ansible?

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.
Ansible is a tool in the Server Configuration and Automation category of a tech stack.
Ansible is an open source tool with 62.4K GitHub stars and 23.8K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Ansible's open source repository on GitHub

Who uses Ansible?

Companies
1911 companies reportedly use Ansible in their tech stacks, including Udemy, LaunchDarkly, and Tokopedia.

Developers
16515 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Ansible.

Ansible Integrations

Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and New Relic are some of the popular tools that integrate with Ansible. Here's a list of all 52 tools that integrate with Ansible.
Pros of Ansible
284
Agentless
210
Great configuration
199
Simple
176
Powerful
155
Easy to learn
69
Flexible
55
Doesn't get in the way of getting s--- done
35
Makes sense
30
Super efficient and flexible
27
Powerful
11
Dynamic Inventory
9
Backed by Red Hat
7
Works with AWS
6
Cloud Oriented
6
Easy to maintain
4
Vagrant provisioner
4
Simple and powerful
4
Multi language
4
Simple
4
Because SSH
4
Procedural or declarative, or both
4
Easy
3
Consistency
2
Well-documented
2
Masterless
2
Debugging is simple
2
Merge hash to get final configuration similar to hiera
2
Fast as hell
1
Manage any OS
1
Work on windows, but difficult to manage
1
Certified Content
Decisions about Ansible

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Ansible in their tech stack.

Needs advice
on
AnsibleAnsible
and
RundeckRundeck

We have a lot of operations running using Rundeck (including deployments) and we also have various roles created in Ansible for infrastructure creation, which we execute using Rundeck. Rundeck we are using a community edition. Since we are already using Rundeck for executing the Ansible role, need an advice. What difference will it make if we replace Rundeck with Ansible Tower? Advantages and Disadvantages? We are using Jenkins to call Rundeck Job, same will be used for Ansible Tower if we replace Rundeck.

See more
Needs advice
on
AnsibleAnsible
and
KubernetesKubernetes

What is the similarities between Kubernetes cluster and Ansible cluster. Kubernetes cluster vs Ansible cluster ?

See more
Suresh Kannan
Sr. Systems Technical Speciali at BMC Software · | 6 upvotes · 53.2K views
Needs advice
on
AnsibleAnsible
and
TerraformTerraform

We use both these tools and are relatively new to them. We have a few questions:

  1. With Terraform, how are you handling changes done outside of Terraform in the Infrastructure?
  2. Are there any limitations or features that we miss in Ansible that Terraform can do? What are those?
See more
Joshua Dean Küpper
CEO at Scrayos UG (haftungsbeschränkt) · | 1 upvote · 87.4K views

We only use Ansible for some limited cluster-management, irregular maintenance tasks and low-level docker debugging and re-configuration on the individual servers, as we chose CoreOS (Fedora CoreOS) as our operating system and setup is done with an ignition-configuration. That is why we don't need to have a playbook for setting up servers or individual services. The servers boot up, completely initialized and ready to use.

See more
Gabriel Guzman
Software Development Manager at Lightspeed · | 1 upvote · 106.9K views
Shared insights

Setting up a personal website, consisting of statically generated html files.

OpenBSD @httpd Hugo Ansible

Rely on the simplicity and security record of OpenBSD to keep my deployments easy to manage and run. Ansible playbooks for easily provisioning copies of the same setup. Using the httpd daemon provided by OpenBSD as it's full featured and included in the base operating system. Hugo creates static html based on markdown files that live in my home directory, and they are copied up to the server using scp.

See more

Blog Posts

PythonDockerKubernetes+14
12
2641
GitGitHubSlack+30
27
18588
JavaScriptGitGitHub+33
20
2118
GitHubDockerAmazon EC2+23
12
6594
JavaScriptGitHubPython+42
53
22075

Ansible's Features

  • Ansible's natural automation language allows sysadmins, developers, and IT managers to complete automation projects in hours, not weeks.
  • Ansible uses SSH by default instead of requiring agents everywhere. Avoid extra open ports, improve security, eliminate "managing the management", and reclaim CPU cycles.
  • Ansible automates app deployment, configuration management, workflow orchestration, and even cloud provisioning all from one system.

Ansible Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Ansible?
Puppet Labs
Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.
Chef
Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.
Salt
Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.
Terraform
With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.
Jenkins
In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.
See all alternatives

Ansible's Followers
15389 developers follow Ansible to keep up with related blogs and decisions.