What is Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool developed by Red Hat that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration.

Key Characteristics

Agentless — no software installed on managed nodes; communicates over SSH (Linux) or WinRM (Windows).

Declarative & Procedural — you describe what you want (install nginx, ensure service is running) in YAML-based Playbooks.

Idempotent — running the same playbook multiple times produces the same result without unintended side effects.

Core Components

Simple Playbook Example

- name: Install and start nginx
  hosts: webservers
  become: true              # sudo
  tasks:
    - name: Install nginx
      ansible.builtin.yum:
        name: nginx
        state: present
    - name: Start and enable nginx
      ansible.builtin.service:
        name: nginx
        state: started
        enabled: true
    - name: Copy config file
      ansible.builtin.copy:
        src: nginx.conf
        dest: /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
      notify: Restart nginx   # triggers handler only if file changed
  handlers:
    - name: Restart nginx
      ansible.builtin.service:
        name: nginx
        state: restarted

Common Use Cases

• Configuration management — enforce consistent state across 100s of servers
• Application deployment — deploy code, run migrations, restart services
• Provisioning — spin up cloud VMs, containers, network devices
• Orchestration — coordinate multi-tier deployments in order
• Patching — rolling OS updates across a fleet
• OpenShift/K8s automation — manage OCP clusters, operators, resources via k8s module

Ansible vs Other Tools

In the OpenShift/Red Hat World

• Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) — enterprise version with UI, RBAC, scheduling
• ansible-playbook for OCP — automate cluster installs, day-2 ops, operator config
• OpenShift + Ansible — often used together; Ansible handles infra, OCP handles workloads
• Operator SDK — some operators are built using Ansible roles