Month: January 2017

Ansible is an open-source configuration management tool i.e. for automating development or production environment setups, cloud provisioning, change management across multiple nodes. The thing which makes Ansible better then the other popular configuration management tools, like Puppet, Chef, etc is it’s agentless architecture. In the formal (Chef and Puppet) you are required to install the daeman/agent on all the nodes i.e. the controller/master node, as well as the nodes you need to manage (can be 100s or 1000s). In case of Ansible all you need to do is install the Ansible on the controller/master node, and it’ll ssh into all the ‘to be managed’ nodes (may require you to add the keys). This architecture not only makes the setup easy, but also reduces the network overhead, as continuous polling of controller node by the client nodes isn’t required. Ansible was initially supported and sponsored by Ansible, Inc (originally AnsibleWorks, Inc) – in October 2015 it was acquired by Red Hat.