How To Manage Remote Servers with Ansible

As a broader subject, configuration management refers to the process of handling changes to a system in a way that assures integrity over time, typically involving the use of tools and processes to facilitate automation and observability.

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

Configuration management systems are designed to streamline the process of controlling large numbers of servers, for administrators and operations teams. They allow you to control many different systems in an automated way from one central location. While there are many…

In this guide, we’ll demonstrate how to create Ansible inventory files and organize servers into groups and subgroups, how to set up host variables, and how to use patterns to control the execution of Ansible commands and playbooks per host and per group.

With Ansible, you can use ad hoc commands to execute one instruction at a time on one or more remote servers. They are ideal to perform tasks that aren’t executed frequently, and to consult information about the remote systems that Ansible manages. In this cheatsheet guide, you’ll learn how to use ad hoc commands to manage one or more servers with Ansible, and how to perform some common tasks this way.

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, it allows you to control one to hundreds of systems from a central location. This short guide demonstrates how to execute Ansible playbooks to automate server setup, using an example playbook that sets up an Nginx server with a single static HTML page.