An Introduction to Configuration Management with Ansible

Introduction

Configuration management is the process of handling changes to a system in a way that assures integrity over time, typically involving tools and processes that facilitate automation and observability. Even though this concept didn’t originate in the IT industry, the term is broadly used to refer to server configuration management.

In the context of servers, configuration management is also commonly referred to as IT Automation or Server Orchestration. Both terms highlight the practical aspects of configuration management and the ability to control multiple systems from a central server.

This guide will walk you through the benefits of using a configuration management tool to automate your server infrastructure setup, and how one such tool, Ansible, can help you with that.

Benefits of Using a Configuration Management Tool

There are a number of configuration management tools available on the market, with varying levels of complexity and diverse architectural styles. Although each of these tools have their own characteristics and work in slightly different ways, they all provide the same function: make sure a system’s state matches the state described by a set of provisioning scripts.

Many of the benefits of configuration management for servers come from the ability to define your infrastructure as code. This enables you to:

• Use a version control system to keep track of any changes in your infrastructure
• Reuse provisioning scripts for multiple server environments, such as development, testing, and production
• Share provisioning scripts between coworkers to facilitate collaboration in a standardised development environment
• Streamline the process of replicating servers, which facilitates recovery from critical errors

Additionally, configuration management tools offer you a way to control one to hundreds of servers from a centralized location, which can dramatically improve efficiency and integrity of your server infrastructure.

Ansible Overview

Ansible is a modern configuration management tool that facilitates the task of setting up and maintaining remote servers, with a minimalist design intended to get users up and running quickly.

Users write Ansible provisioning scripts in YAML, a user-friendly data serialization standard that is not tied to any particular programming language. This enables users to create sophisticated provisioning scripts more intuitively compared to similar tools in the same category.

Ansible doesn’t require any special software to be installed on the nodes that will be managed with this tool. A control machine is set up with the Ansible software, which then communicates with the nodes via standard SSH.

As a configuration management tool and automation framework, Ansible encapsulates all of the common features present in other tools of the same category, while still maintaining a strong focus on simplicity and performance:

Idempotent Behavior

Ansible keeps track of the state of resources in managed systems in order to avoid repeating tasks that were executed before. If a package was already installed, it won’t try to install it again. The objective is that after each provisioning execution the system reaches (or keeps) the desired state, even if you run it multiple times. This is what characterizes Ansible and other configuration management tools as having an idempotent behavior. When running a playbook, you’ll see the status of each task being executed and whether or not the task performed a change in the system.

Support to Variables, Conditionals, and Loops

When writing Ansible automation scripts, you can use variables, conditionals, and loops in order to make your automation more versatile and efficient.

System Facts

Ansible collects a series of detailed information about the managed nodes, such as network interfaces and operating system, and provides it as global variables called system facts. Facts can be used within playbooks to make your automation more versatile and adaptive, behaving differently depending on the system being provisioned.

Templating System

Ansible uses the Jinja2 Python templating system to allow for dynamic expressions and access to variables. Templates can be used to facilitate setting up configuration files and services. For instance, you can use a template to set up a new virtual host within Apache, while reusing the same template for multiple server installations.

Support for Extensions and Modules

Ansible comes with hundreds of built-in modules to facilitate writing automation for common systems administration tasks, such as installing packages with apt and synchronizing files with rsync, and also for dealing with popular software such as database systems (like MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and others) and dependency management tools (such as PHP’s composer, Ruby’s gem, Node’s npm, and others). Apart from that, there are various ways in which you can extend Ansible: plugins and modules are good options when you need a custom functionality that is not present by default.

You can also find third-party modules and plugins in the Ansible Galaxy portal.

Getting Familiar with Ansible Concepts

We’ll now have a look at Ansible terminology and concepts to help familiarize you with these terms as they come up throughout this series.

Control Node

A control node is a system where Ansible is installed and set up to connect to your server. You can have multiple control nodes, and any system capable of running Ansible can be set up as a control node, including personal computers or laptops running a Linux or Unix based operating system. For the time being, Ansible can’t be installed on Windows hosts, but you can circumvent this limitation by setting up a virtual machine that runs Linux and running Ansible from there.

Managed Nodes

The systems you control using Ansible are called managed nodes. Ansible requires that managed nodes are reachable via SSH, and have Python 2 (version 2.6 or higher) or Python 3 (version 3.5 or higher) installed.

Ansible supports a variety of operating systems including Windows servers as managed nodes.

Inventory

An inventory file contains a list of the hosts you’ll manage using Ansible. Although Ansible typically creates a default inventory file when installed, you can use per-project inventories to have a better separation of your infrastructure and avoid running commands or playbooks on the wrong server by mistake. Static inventories are usually created as .ini files, but you can also use dynamically generated inventories written in any programming language able to return JSON.

Tasks

In Ansible, a task is an individual unit of work to execute on a managed node. Each action to perform is defined as a task. Tasks can be executed as a one-off action via ad-hoc commands, or included in a playbook as part of an automation script.

Playbook

A playbook contains an ordered list of tasks, and a few other directives to indicate which hosts are the target of that automation, whether or not to use a privilege escalation system to run those tasks, and optional sections to define variables or include files. Ansible executes tasks sequentially, and a full playbook execution is called a play. Playbooks are written in YAML format.

Handlers

Handlers are used to perform actions on a service, such as restarting or stopping a service that is actively running on the managed node’s system. Handlers are typically triggered by tasks, and their execution happens at the end of a play, after all tasks are finished. This way, if more than one task triggers a restart to a service, for instance, the service will only be restarted once and after all tasks are executed. Although the default handler behavior is more efficient and overall a better practice, it is also possible to force immediate handler execution if that is required by a task.

Roles

A role is a set of playbooks and related files organized into a predefined structure that is known by Ansible. Roles facilitate reusing and repurposing playbooks into shareable packages of granular automation for specific goals, such as installing a web server, installing a PHP environment, or setting up a MySQL server.

Conclusion

Ansible is a minimalist IT automation tool that has a gentle learning curve, thanks in part to its use of YAML for its provisioning scripts. It has a great number of built-in modules that can be used to abstract tasks such as installing packages and working with templates. Its simplified infrastructure requirements and accessible syntax can be a good fit for those who are getting started with configuration management.

In the next part of this series, we’ll see how to install and get started with Ansible on an Ubuntu 20.04 server.