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

We've established that the Ansible control node is the node that runs the Ansible software and uses different modules/plugins to manage other nodes. The control node is the center of the Ansible system and we use it to write, store, and execute playbooks and other configurations on the managed nodes.

# Setting up an Ansible control node

Setting up an Ansible control node involves a series of steps, including:

- Choosing a machine.
- Installing Ansible.
- Testing the installation.
- Writing the inventory.

## Choosing a machine

We first need to decide the type of machine to use for our control node in terms of its size and computer power. The second consideration is the OS of the machine to be used. Ideally, Ansible requires that we run a control node on a machine that is Unix-like. This includes most Linux flavors as well as a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) distribution on Windows. We also need to note that the version of Ansible we plan to run determines the required base operating system. For instance, running the latest version of Ansible (Ansible Core 2.14) requires installing an operating system with support for Python 3.9 or later. Ansible relies heavily on Python, and all its modules and plugins are written in Python.

Here are some of the options we can explore to spin up a machine for our Ansible control node:

Get familiar with how to configure an Ansible control node.

Getting Started

What Is Configuration Management?

Basics of Ansible

Major Concepts in Ansible

Ansible Variables and Other Elements

Manage Configuration with Ansible

Wrap Up

Deploy a Web Application Using Ansible

The Ansible Control Node

Setting up an Ansible control node

Choosing a machine