Doing things by hand is an accident-prone method of development. DevOps best practices state that we should automate as much as possible. Automation helps developers be more productive elsewhere, in addition to eliminating human error. We can follow this best practice by using tools that enable things like Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. One such tool is Ansible.
Ansible Basics
Ansible is an open-source tool that enables automation in your environment. In the past, you may have needed to manually coordinate to deliver an application to your end users. Now, Ansible can do that work for you, from automating cloud provisioning, application deployment, configuration management, and more.
Ansible can also help orchestrate zero-downtime deployments to deliver the best experience to your end user. This is especially important in our fast-paced world; consumers expect to be able to reach their services at all times, while simultaneously desiring the services to be continuously improved.
How Does Ansible Work?
Getting started with Ansible is as simple as describing your automation job in YAML. This description takes the form of an Ansible Playbook. When going through your DevOps CI/CD pipeline, Ansible uses this playbook to provision everything you described for your deployment in the exact same way, every time. This means that your deployments are simple and repeatable, without any human error.
To create and provision resources in Azure, you’ll need a Linux VM with Ansible configured. Additionally, as Ansible is agentless, it will need SSH authentication using a key pair and an SSH service connection in Azure DevOps.
To learn more, or to get started with Ansible today, contact our team of experts here at PRAKTIK.