Ansible is an Open Source technology that will help you manage a constant task or large environments on a simple and painless way, saving your time, money and , efforts and helping DevOps.

1. Ansible, the best and less time consuming option.
Best
practices for
automation
with Ansible.

2. ANSIBLE
There are several Open Source technologies that will help you
manage constant task or large environments on a simple and
painless way, saving your time, money and , efforts and helping
DevOps. We found out that Ansible may be your best friend on
those situations.
We'll see the reasons of why to select Ansible:

3. 01 BENEFITS
It’s simple and easy to learn.
It's written in python.
Agentless, for managing nodes.
YAML bases Playbooks.
Best documentation ever.

4. 02 Immutable Server Architecture
Do you need to create the same architecture multiple times for different
environments with Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
Ansible it’s a great option for creating AWS Load Balancers, RDS and functional
EC2 servers, running the latest version of your code with just 1 click. Sounds
amazing right?
Another great example is using Ansible to patch security holes on our
architecture. Imagine having 100+ servers and all of them have the same security
issue. Like Heartbleed SSH issue.
Here are some examples:

5. 02.1 Example 1
The following playbook was run against 100+ servers and patched the bash
vulnerability in less than 10 minutes. The below example updates both Debian and
Red Hat Linux variants. It will first run on half of all the hosts that are defined in an
inventory file.

6. 02.2 Example 2
The following playbook was run against 100+ servers patching the HeartBleed vulnerability. At
the time, I also noticed that the servers needed an updated version of OpenSSH. The below
example updates both Debian and RedHat linux variants. It will patch and reboot 25% of the
servers at a time until all of the hosts defined in the inventory file are updated.

7. 03 Have predefined ansible roles and
playbook for common situations.
Playbooks are simple to write and maintain. Most users become productive with Ansible
after only a few hours. Ansible uses the same tools you already use on a daily basis.
Also the playbooks are written in a natural language so they are very easy to evolve and
edit.
You can create predefined roles, for example, Nginx installation and configuration
according your need and it’s just matter of executing the role and that’s it! Simple,
right? Let’s imagine you need to update PHP version in a environment. If in the
environment there are just 2 servers using PHP, it’s really simple.. but imagine the
environment has 100 servers. This can take a long time and will be a headache.

8. The simpliest
solution.
Ansible is the simpliest solution for configuration management available. It’s
designed to be minimal in nature, consistent, secure, and highly reliable, with an
extremely low learning curve for administrators, developers, and IT managers.The
configurations are simple data descriptions of your infrastructure; ensuring everyone
on your team will be able to understand the meaning of each configuration task.

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ARTICLE SOURCE: HTTPS://WWW.CLICKITTECH.COM/INFORMATION/BEST-PRACTICES-FOR-
AUTOMATION-WITH-ANSIBLE
How to
manage Linux
Servers with
Ansible
Benefits of
Managed
Services vs
non Managed
Services
How to build
Ansible
Playbooks and
Automate
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