Ansible

We have observed a decrease in our usage of Ansible recently. Our current focus lies more on immutable infrastructure using cloud providers. Nonetheless, Ansible still offers great benefits for mutable infrastructure that require support and is an excellent tool for achieving Infrastructure as Code in such cases.

Ansible is a tool used to describe infrastructure and applications and their configuration as code. It covers both the configuration and provisioning aspects of infrastructure and applications.

It is a radically simple IT automation system based on SSH so that it can work without agents or exposed APIs. It handles configuration management, application deployment, cloud provisioning, ad-hoc task execution, network automation, and multi-node orchestration.

It comes in handy when the client currently uses some virtual machines with docker/docker-compose, and no full-blown Kubernetes cluster is available or needed.