Ansible and Python

• Firstly, Ansible is written in the Python programming language and has a quite minimal learning curve.
• Ansible setup is pretty simple and functionality it provides is widely used in the IT services automation.
• Python is the preferred language to use to develop as it is quite compatible and easy to sync with ansible.

Ansible with Python:

Ansible Playbooks:

Simple yml formatted files which helps the developers to define a streamline flow of tasks to be achieved while performing a job. These Playbooks can be referred to as automated bots which helps us perform for example shell commands, python scripting and many more additional features.

Basic Programming language add ons are present to like storing data in variables and modifying the same. Can be reused, recyclable for other used cases. Sometimes separate tasks are created and included like classes in C++.

Action Plugins:

To talk about in a nutshell, these are basically python scripts itself just that some extra functionality and classes are added to integrate them with the playbooks. Action Plugins act as a programming soldier that inputs data declared by the playbook and modify the data for the used case as programmed by us. We can return the data to the playbook such that further tasks can be performed on that data.

Mainly purpose is to automate the manual steps and reduce vulnerabilities.

Ansible Tower:

Ansible Tower can be called as a hub of the ansible playbooks which makes the playbooks easier to maintain, run and debug while development. Tower is an open source tool which can be altered as per the requirements by the organizations. Tower provides too many functionalities like scheduling the playbooks and automating them, add separate projects directly and easily as its UI is clean and easy to use. After a basic understanding debugging is easy to execute and trustworthy process is cultivated for a long term.

Ansible Tower is the Manager of the Ansible Playbooks which assists the developers on more than what I offered in this article.
Will create a detailed article on this though. Checkout for more.