Ansible: Up and Running

Glossary

Alias

When the name of a host in the inventory is different from the actual hostname of the host.

AMI

Amazon Machine Image, a virtual machine image in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as EC2.

Ansible, Inc.

The company that manages the Ansible project.

Ansible Galaxy

A repository of Ansible roles contributed by the community.

Ansible Tower

A proprietary web-based dashboard and REST interface for controlling Ansible, sold by Ansible, Inc.

Check mode

An optional mode when running a playbook. When check mode is enabled, and when Ansible executes a playbook, it will not make any changes to remote hosts. Instead, it will simply report whether each task would have changed the state of the host. Sometimes referred to as “dry run” mode.

CIDR

Classless Inter-Domain Routing, a notation for specifying a range of IP addresses, used when defining Amazon EC2 security groups.

Configuration management

A process for ensuring that servers are in the proper state for doing their job.

By state, we mean things like the configuration files for server applications have the correct values, the proper files are present, the correct services are running, the expected user accounts are present, permissions are set correctly, and so on.

Convergence

A property of configuration management systems where the system will execute multiple times against a server in order to get the server to reach the desired state, with each execution bringing the server closer to the desired ...