Configuration management is the practice of systematically managing and controlling the configuration of software, systems, and infrastructure components throughout their lifecycle. It involves capturing, tracking, and enforcing the desired state or configuration of these elements to ensure consistency, reliability, and efficiency.
Configuration management helps organizations maintain control over their IT infrastructure by providing mechanisms to define, deploy, and manage configurations in a structured and automated manner. It enables the management of various aspects, such as software versions, system configurations, hardware settings, network configurations, security policies, and more.
Configuration management tools, such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and SaltStack, provide frameworks and features to facilitate the implementation of configuration management practices. These tools enable infrastructure as code (IaC) approaches, where configuration is defined in code and can be version controlled, tested, and deployed consistently across environments.
1. Agentless: Ansible is an agentless automation tool, which means it does not require any agents or additional software to be installed on the target hosts. It uses SSH or PowerShell to connect to and manage remote systems, making it lightweight and easy to set up.
2. Configuration Management and Orchestration: Ansible is known for its configuration management capabilities, allowing you to define and enforce the desired state of systems. It also provides powerful orchestration features to automate complex workflows and tasks across multiple systems.
3. Playbooks: Ansible uses YAML-based playbooks to define automation tasks and configurations. Playbooks allow you to express configurations, deployments, and orchestration in a human-readable and version-controlled format.
4. Idempotent: Ansible follows an idempotent model, meaning that the state of a system remains the same regardless of how many times a playbook is executed. This ensures that running the same playbook multiple times does not lead to unintended changes.
5. Broad Platform Support: Ansible supports a wide range of operating systems, including Linux, macOS, and Windows. It can manage a variety of infrastructure components, such as servers, networking devices, databases, and cloud services like AWS, Azure, and GCP.
6. Large and Active Community: Ansible has a vibrant and active community of users and contributors. It benefits from continuous development and enhancements driven by community feedback and contributions.
7. Integration Ecosystem: Ansible integrates well with other tools and systems. It has a rich collection of modules that enable interactions with various technologies and services, such as cloud platforms, containers, networking devices, and more. Ansible can also be integrated with CI/CD pipelines, monitoring systems, and configuration management databases (CMDBs).
8. Extensibility: Ansible is highly extensible, allowing you to develop custom modules and plugins to extend its functionality and integrate with unique environments or systems.
9. Ansible Tower: Ansible Tower (now known as Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform) is a web-based UI and management platform for Ansible. It provides additional features like role-based access control, job scheduling, graphical inventory management, and more.
10. Open Source: Ansible is an open-source tool released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). This means it is freely available, and its source code can be modified and distributed.
