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The 10 best tricks for taming Ansible

Right the First Time

Article from ADMIN 74/2023

By Martin Loschwitz

Ansible is considered by far the most practical automation tool, but in many places, quirks make life with the tool unnecessarily complicated. We reveal the 10 best tricks for Ansible on Linux.

In the open source community, people say that Red Hat has a lucky hand when it comes to acquiring other organizations. Many of the acquisitions have since gone on to enjoy an extremely successful existence, including Ceph and Qumranet, the company that launched KVM. Another example of Red Hat's prowess in their shopping sprees is undoubtedly Ansible, which to this day is considered a lean and easy-to-use but still highly efficient automation tool.

If you don't like Puppet, Salt, or even Chef, with their complicated syntaxes, you can enjoy true automation with Ansible – and in a format that almost rivals the simplicity of shell scripts. Some people might need a while to get used to the YAML format, but once the few essential basics are in place, Ansible offers almost boundless automation fun for the whole (operating system) family.

People who eventually become truly adept at Ansible far too often adopt quirks from their own training days that make Ansible inefficient, more complex, or just more difficult to use than it really needs to be. The program's simple controls are, in fact, its undoing. Some admins too often believe that they already know everything about Ansible and – following this logic – stop acquiring further skills. In many companies, this means that large parts of the functionality of the automation system – and thus a large part of its really great feature set – are practically idle.

I want to help you put a stop to that. In this article I reveal how to make sense of your playbooks, what rules to follow, and how to get more out of Ansible than might seem possible in standard use. Although just a few pages are not enough to explain all the special features in Ansible and show all the best practices, the available space is certainly enough to give you food for thought for your own journeys of exploration, so I'll start with a parade of the 10 best tricks for Ansible.

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