Automation is fast becoming the name of the game in the IT industry. Without automation, most digital businesses would find it difficult to remain sustainable and cope with the ever-increasing competition in the market. IT organizations can speed up their workflows and deliver applications faster by automating across different services and applications. There are many tools for automation, and one of the more popular ones is Ansible. If you want to automate your IT business processes, there are several good reasons to consider Ansible automation.

What is Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source community software project developed by Michael DeHaan for the Red Hat company in 2012. Available for free, you can use it to improve the consistency, reliability, and scalability of complex and multi-tier IT application environments. The Ansible software can run on Unix-like systems, and you can use it to configure Unix-like systems and Microsoft Windows.

With the Ansible automation engine, you can seamlessly automate many IT infrastructure local and remote requirements such as intra-service orchestration, application deployment, cloud provisioning, and configuration management of databases, networks, storage devices, and firewalls.

Written in Python, Ansible has the following components:

• Controller machine: The main machine on which you install Ansible and which is responsible for configuring and provisioning the relevant servers.

• Inventory: The file that groups the hosts or nodes that Ansible can access and gives it information about the servers.

• Playbook: It comprises scripts written in the simple and easy-to-read YAML language that describe the automation tasks that Ansible has to perform.

• Play: The execution from start to finish of the playbook is known as play.

• Task: It describes the action that Ansible must take.

• Module: It is a small piece of code that is used as an executable plug-in. You can use inbuilt as well as custom-built modules.

• Role: A role is a group containing tasks that makes it easier to manage and reuse the tasks.

• Facts: These are global variables that provide information related to the system.

• Handlers: With these, it is possible to trigger changes in the status of the service.

What are the benefits of using Ansible for automation and orchestration?

The benefits of using Ansible for business automation and orchestration are as follows:

Automation

The automation involves creating sets of machines and using the Ansible Playbooks and the simple YAML language to describe the automated tasks that these machines must perform. Ansible will then issue the commands from a central location for the machines to perform these tasks.

Ansible is very easy to learn as compared to other IT automation engines. You do not need to have any specific coding skills since Ansible’s playbooks have a clear syntax.

Ansible automation does not require any extra customized security infrastructure, so it is very easy to deploy.

You only have to install Ansible on your control machine or computer. It is not necessary to install any service software on the client systems that you are automating.

Ansible uses OpenSSH as a secure network authentication protocol and can easily connect with other authentication management systems.

With Ansible automation, you can automate highly complex IT workflows.

Orchestration

Orchestration is the process of making sure that disparate IT services can work together without any issues and perform their respective tasks in the right order.

You can use Ansible to define the infrastructure you require and align the business needs with it and the relevant data and applications. One of the great things about using Ansible as an orchestration tool is that you only have to define the infrastructure and Ansible will allow you to use and reuse it as you require. You can deploy the same orchestration for multiple tasks. With automated workflows, cloud provisioning, intra-service orchestration, and other services, Ansible makes it easier to orchestrate tasks.

Ansible can manage multi-tier and non-system-specific orchestration of complex configurations and application deployments. It can give you fine automated control over each process step. You can scale up the infrastructure or scale it down as per your requirement.

Since applications can be server and services-centric, Ansible can orchestrate both servers and REST APIs.

With Ansible, it is possible to use parallel SSH scripts and also resource models to run commands against numerous servers.