Gain insights into Ansible's core features like inventory, playbooks, and roles. Delve into writing playbooks, using Jinja2, and organize tasks for efficient, stable IT infrastructure management.

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Configuration management plays a pivotal role in maintaining a stable and organized IT infrastructure by enabling the systematic gathering of information from remote hosts, facilitating server provisioning, and streamlining application upgrades or deployments.

You will learn the core features of Ansible, such as inventory, variables, playbooks, roles, and handlers, which serve as the building blocks for configuration management. You will learn how to write playbooks that define and execute complex orchestration tasks with ease. Next, you’ll learn how to use roles to maintain consistency across configuration management projects and how to harness the power of Jinja2 to apply logic and control structures and generate configuration files dynamically.

After completing this course, you will be equipped with the necessary skills for customizing configurations, organizing automation tasks efficiently, and maintaining a desired state for your infrastructure.

Configuration Management Using Ansible

# What is configuration management?

**Configuration management** involves the maintenance of system configuration in an automated way. With the help of configuration management, we can install software packages or manage configuration on remote hosts. 

For example, when we need to install the `docker` or `docker-compose` packages to manage a container at runtime, we can use a configuration management tool, e.g., Ansible, to install these packages and even update them to a required version.

# Benefits of configuration management
- **Reusability:** Infrastructure configuration with a configuration management tool is easily reusable, thereby reducing duplication of effort.
- **Accurate reporting of activities:** Because we use version control systems like `git` to store configuration files, it's easier to log the changes made to the environment, the details of who made them, and what was changed.
- **Collaboration and communication:** With version control, teams can effectively collaborate before deploying configuration changes.
- **Auditing:** Configuration management tools like Ansible help access current configurations and can be used to show the differences between the desired state and the current state.
- **Recoverability:** Recoverability is guaranteed because the configuration can be recovered easily in case of a disaster to a company's IT infrastructure.

Now, we'll walk through the following example of configuration management to easily install the `docker` and `docker-compose` packages on a remote host.

# Installing the `docker` and `docker-compose` packages

We'll follow the steps given below to install the two packages. A sample playbook has been prepared for our use, which targets installation against our workspace so we can explore the package installations.

1. We can check the packages that will be installed by executing the `ansible-playbook` command in check mode:
   ```s
   ansible-playbook -D -C install_docker.yml
   ``` 
2. We can execute the following command to actually install the packages:
   ```s
   ansible-playbook -D install_docker.yml
   ```
3. We can verify installations by checking the versions of the installed packages using the following commands:
   ```s
   docker --version
   ```
   ```s
   docker-compose --version
   ````


Get an introduction to configuration management and discover its benefits.

Getting Started

What Is Configuration Management?

Basics of Ansible

Major Concepts in Ansible

Ansible Variables and Other Elements

Manage Configuration with Ansible

Wrap Up

Introduction to Configuration Management

What is configuration management?

Benefits of configuration management

Installing the `docker` and `docker-compose` packages

Playground