Introduction to Ansible
If you are looking to get the most out of your devops teams and improve efficiencies look no further, Ansible is the answer. Ansible is an open source IT automation engine that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and many other IT processes. It is an open source tool with no subscription and thousands of experienced developers for contribution. Ansible is not dependent on agent software and has no additional security infrastructure. Therefore, it makes deployment easy. Everything requires to be written in simple script form. This makes conducting version control easy.
Features of Ansible
Configuration Management
Ansible is easy to use, delivers consistent outputs and reliable for managing the configurations. Ansible configurations are simple descriptions of data and infrastructure, which are easily understandable by machines and humans.
Deployment of Applications
If you want to deploy multi-tier applications quickly with ease, Ansible can be the tool of choice. No custom code is required for system automation. Ansible has playbooks that can be leveraged to classify the different tasks. Ansible utilizes the playbooks to configure your system to your demand.
Orchestration
If you have various workflows and want them to be organized to efficiently deliver the outputs Ansible can help you with the orchestration needs. So essentially create, modify, manage automated workflows day in day out.
Compliance & Security
Using Ansible, you can implement extensive security policies, such as firewall rules or locking down users, sitewide, deploy applications, and automate other processes. By configuring security details on the control, you eliminate the need to manually monitor each machine for security compliance.
Cloud Provisioning
Automating the provisioning of infrastructure is the first step in automating your application’s life cycle. With Ansible, you can provision cloud platforms, network devices, virtualized hosts, and bare-metal servers.
How is Ansible different from Jenkins?
Well, the purpose of Jenkins is kind of different than Ansible. Jenkins uses the Continuous Integration (CI) principles as a tool to build and test software projects. On the other hand, Ansible automates the deployment, setup, and administration of infrastructure and applications as a configuration management and orchestration tool. Jenkins has a some what complicated user inter phase and is more suited for a experienced person to setup and configure. But it does have a bag full of goodies (plugins) managing build and test processes that makes life easier. Ansible on the other hand is much easier to use and even a newbie can learn early with its easy syntax type.
Conclusion
You can use Jenkins and Ansible as components of a larger testing and deployment pipeline. For instance, Jenkins can develop and test software changes, while Ansible can deploy these changes to production environments. Jenkins is the recommended solution for smaller tasks requiring multiple tools like build, testing, and code quality analysis. Ansible excels in managing complex infrastructures with numerous servers due to its efficient inventory management system. It is particularly effective for system management tasks. In general, Jenkins is preferred for testing software projects, whereas Ansible is better suited for automating the deployment, configuration, and management of infrastructure and applications. These tools can be integrated to form a comprehensive testing and deployment pipeline.