INTEGRATION: Ansible and Windows
What is ansible?
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.
Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.
Use cases
- Configuration management
Centralizing configuration file management and deployment is a common use case for Ansible
2. Application development
When you define your application with Ansible, and manage the deployment with Ansible Tower, teams are able to effectively manage the entire application lifecycle from development to production.
3. Continuous delivery
Creating a CI/CD pipeline requires buy-in from numerous teams. You can’t do it without a simple automation platform that everyone in your organization can use. Ansible Playbooks keep your applications properly deployed (and managed) throughout their entire lifecycle.
4. Security Automation
When you define your security policy in Ansible, scanning and remediation of site-wide security policy can be integrated into other automated processes and instead of being an afterthought, it’ll be integral in everything that is deployed.
5. Orchestration
Configurations alone don’t define your environment. You need to define how multiple configurations interact and ensure the disparate pieces can be managed as a whole. Out of complexity and chaos, Ansible brings order.
Lets see how Ansible works with windows ;)
Users and customers love Ansible because of it’s simple, agentless, powerful automation that allows them to model and deliver any configuration, any deployment, any environment across their IT infrastructure.
Ansible knew that the key was to bring the same simple, agentless paradigm to managing Windows, while still feeling native to Windows administrators. Ansible’s native Windows support uses Windows PowerShell remoting to manage Windows like Windows in the same Ansible agentless way that Ansible manages Linux like Linux.
With Ansible’s native Windows support, you can, out of the box:
- Gather facts on Windows hosts
- Install and uninstall MSIs
- Enable and disable Windows Features
- Start, stop, and manage Windows services
- Create and manage local users and groups
- Manage Windows packages via the Chocolatey package manager
- Manage and install Windows updates
- Fetch files from remote sites
- Push and execute any PowerShell scripts you write
Because of Ansible’s easy extensibility, you can write your own modules in PowerShell and extend Ansible for whatever other functionality you need. Ansible users have written modules for managing filesystem ACLs, managing Windows Firewall, and managing hostname and domain membership, and more