Ansible is created by contributions from an active open source community.
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Ansible is powerful IT automation that you can learn quickly.
Learn the fundamentals of Ansible: powerful IT automation software that emphasizes simplicity and ease of use.
Ansible® is an open source, command-line IT automation software application written in Python. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate advanced workflows to support application deployment, system updates, and more.
Ansible’s main strengths are simplicity and ease of use. It also has a strong focus on security and reliability, featuring minimal moving parts. It uses OpenSSH for transport (with other transports and pull modes as alternatives), and uses a human-readable language that is designed for getting started quickly without a lot of training.
Comparing community Ansible with Red Hat® Ansible Automation Platform? Understand the differences
The community distribution of Ansible contains a suite of powerful command line tools supported on most operating systems with Python installed. This includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux®, Debian, Ubuntu, MacOS, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, and more. For more information on installing Ansible refer to the installation documentation.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a subscription product built on the foundations of Ansible with numerous enterprise features. It combines more than a dozen upstream projects into an integrated, streamlined product. Each product component also has a specific purpose with a well-defined scope. For example, the automation controller is the WebUI and API for Ansible automation, which is based on the upstream project AWX. This component is bundled into the platform to manage automation. Ansible Automation Platform is available to be run on-premise and charged by node (rather than by user), or you can use the managed application on Microsoft Azure.
This page will give you an overview of Ansible fundamentals that apply to both community Ansible and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. For more detail, please visit docs.ansible.com.
Both community Ansible and Ansible Automation Platform are built on the concept of a control node and a managed node. Ansible is executed from the control node—for example, where a user runs the ansible-playbook command. Managed nodes are the devices being automated—for example, a Microsoft Windows server.
For automating Linux and Windows, Ansible connects to managed nodes and pushes out small programs—called Ansible modules—to them. These programs are written to be resource models of the desired state of the system. Ansible then executes these modules (over SSH by default), and removes them when finished. These modules are designed to be idempotent when possible, so that they only make changes to a system when necessary.
For automating network devices and other IT appliances where modules cannot be executed, Ansible runs on the control node. Since Ansible is agentless, it can still communicate with devices without requiring an application or service to be installed on the managed node. To increase execution capacity for devices without the ability to run modules, Ansible Automation Platform can spread automation jobs out across execution nodes using a technology called automation mesh. To understand more about how network automation works, read the e-book.
For automating public clouds and web services, Ansible will also run modules locally and talk directly to their APIs. For more information, read these docs:
For Ansible to execute, it needs an inventory (what are the managed nodes I am trying to automate?) and credentials (how do I login and connect to those managed nodes?).
Community Ansible is decentralized—meaning it relies on your existing OS credentials to control access to remote machines. And if needed, Ansible can easily connect with Kerberos, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), and other centralized authentication management systems. You can also just store usernames and passwords as variables for Ansible and encrypt them with Ansible Vault. This can be as easy as storing them in your inventory file, as described below.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can centralize authentication as well as integrate with industry-standard tools like CyberArk AIM, Conjur, HashiCorp Vault, and Microsoft Azure Key Vault. Automation controller hashes local automation controller user passwords with the PBKDF2 algorithm using a SHA256 hash. Users who authenticate via external account mechanisms (LDAP, SAML, OAuth, and others) do not have any password or secret stored.
Read the secret handling and connection security documentation
By default, Ansible represents which machines it manages using a very simple INI file that puts all of your managed machines in groups of your own choosing.
To add new machines, there is no additional SSL signing server involved, so there's never any hassle deciding why a particular machine didn’t get linked up due to obscure NTP or DNS issues.
If there's another source of truth in your infrastructure, Ansible can also plug in to that, such as drawing inventory, group, and variable information from sources like Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, VMware vCenter, and more. Both community Ansible and Ansible Automation Platform can use a variety of dynamic inventory plugins. Ansible Automation Platform makes these easily available and configurable in the WebUI.
Here's what a plain text inventory file looks like:
[webservers]
www1.example.com
www2.example.com
[dbservers]
db0.example.com
db1.example.com
Once inventory hosts are listed, variables can be assigned to them in simple text files (in a subdirectory called 'group_vars/' or 'host_vars/') or directly in the inventory file.
Or, as already mentioned, you can use a dynamic inventory to pull your inventory from data sources like AWS and Azure.
Playbooks can finely orchestrate multiple slices of your IT infrastructure, with very detailed control over how many machines to tackle at a time. This is where Ansible starts to get most interesting.
Ansible's approach to orchestration is one of finely tuned simplicity, as we believe you should be able to use existing knowledge while not having to remember special syntax or features.
Here's what a playbook looks like. As a reminder, this is only here as a teaser—visit docs.ansible.com for the complete documentation, and see all that's possible.
---
- name: Apache server installed
hosts: web
become: true
tasks:
- name: latest Apache version installed
yum:
name: httpd
state: latest
- name: Apache enabled and running
service:
name: httpd
enabled: true
state: started
- name: copy index.html
copy:
src: web.html
dest: /var/www/html/index.html
The Ansible documentation explores this in much greater depth. There’s a LOT more that you can do, including:
There are lots of advanced possibilities, but it's easy to get started.
Most importantly, the language remains readable and transparent, and you never have to do things like declare explicit ordering relationships or write code in a programming language.
Should you want to write your own, Ansible modules can be written in any language that can return JSON (Ruby, Python, Powershell, bash, etc.). You can also plug in an inventory to any datasource by writing a program that speaks to that datasource and returns JSON. There are also various Python APIs for extending Ansible’s connection types (SSH is not the only transport possible), callbacks (how Ansible logs, etc), and even for adding new server-side behaviors.
Community Ansible is a great starting point for automation. But Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is built with the needs of enterprise automators in mind. It delivers more capabilities for event-driven automation and generative AI, more control with added security and reporting tools, and more confidence with life cycle technical support—so you can scale automation across your organization in a flexible, standardized way.
Here are 3 example instances of when Ansible Automation Platform might make sense for an organization: