Hello dev.to community! 👋
Yesterday, I explored Terraform, a powerful Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool for provisioning cloud resources. Today, I’m diving into Ansible, a widely used tool for automating server configuration, application deployment, and orchestration.
🔹 Why Ansible Matters
While Terraform creates infrastructure, you still need to configure servers and applications running on them. That’s where Ansible shines:
✅ Agentless → Works over SSH (no agents to install)
✅ Idempotent → Ensures configs reach and stay in the desired state
✅ Scalable → Manage 10 or 1,000+ servers with the same playbook
✅ Declarative & Simple → YAML syntax makes it beginner-friendly
🧠 Core Ansible Concepts
Inventory → Defines your servers (hosts file with IPs/domains)
Modules → Reusable units to perform tasks (install package, copy file, etc.)
Playbook → YAML file describing tasks to apply to hosts
Roles → Structured way to organize playbooks for reusability
Ad-hoc Commands → Quick one-liners for immediate actions
🔧 Example: Simple Playbook
- name: Install Nginx on Ubuntu
hosts: webservers
become: yes
tasks:
- name: Install Nginx package apt: name: nginx state: present
👉 Run with:
ansible-playbook -i hosts install_nginx.yml
This will automatically install and configure Nginx on your defined servers.
🛠️ DevOps Use Cases
Automated server provisioning (installing software, setting users, configuring firewalls)
Application deployment (Java, Node.js, Python apps)
Managing secrets and configs
Works great with Terraform → Terraform provisions infra, Ansible configures it
⚡ Pro Tips
Use Ansible Galaxy for community roles (huge time-saver 🚀)
Store playbooks in Git for collaboration and version control
Integrate with Jenkins / GitHub Actions for automated deployments
Secure credentials using Ansible Vault
🧪 Hands-on Mini-Lab (Try this!)
1️⃣ Install Ansible on your machine
2️⃣ Create an inventory file (hosts) with your server IP
3️⃣ Write a playbook to install Nginx or Apache
4️⃣ Run ansible-playbook and verify the installation
🎯 Key Takeaway:
Ansible bridges the gap between infrastructure and applications, making configuration management and deployment fast, reliable, and repeatable — an essential skill for any DevOps engineer.
🔜 Tomorrow (Day 18):
I’ll explore CI/CD with Jenkins — automating build, test, and deploy pipelines. 🔄
🔖 #Ansible #DevOps #Automation #IaC #ConfigurationManagement #SRE
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