Things to know before working with ansible

1. ansible is agentless ( means, we do not need to run any agent on remote servers for communication )

2. ansible follows push model ( means we push the configuration from ansible controller to remote servers )

3. ansible uses SSH protocol to communicate with remote servers

4. ansible uses below methods for remote servers authentication

   • password based
   • key based

Ansible controller ( is the machine/host/server where we install ansible )

• /etc/ansible default directory ( we have two important file in it )

• hosts ( default inventory file in which we can mention remote servers we want to apply/push the changes to)

• ansible.cfg ( default ansible configuraton - can be used to customize as per our need )

Ansible Terminlogy

1. ansible ad-hoc commands ( single task that can be executed against remote servers )

2. ansible playbooks ( set of instructions written in a .yml file to execute against remote servers )

3. ansible facts ( information about remote servers collected ansible before running any task )

4. ansible modules ( are the units of work that ansible ships to remote servers for executing the tasks )

5. ansible role ( to break a playbook into multiple files. This simplifies writing complex playbooks, and it makes them easier to reuse )

look at: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/reference_appendices/glossary.html for more terms used in ansible.