Do you want to start using Ansible? Are you already using it, but coming up against challenges? Even if you don’t fall into either category, don’t stop reading. I’m going to show you why you might actually need Ansible and how to best take advantage of it..
Ansible’s catchphrase is “simple IT automation,” which is a pretty accurate description of what it does. In its most popular mode of operation (there are several), Ansible is described as a desired state of input, and it manipulates a set of machines to achieve this state. At this point, you may be thinking “yeah, but we’ve already got shell scripts for that.” Ansible, though, offers several advantages over good old shell scripts.
First of all, the playbook, which describes the desired state, is declarative and written in YAML. Using a playbook means you don’t need to handle the error control and condition checking yourself. It also means no actions will be taken if the state is already satisfied (e.g. apt-get won’t run if there’s an nginx package installed).
But this is only part of the story.
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