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Ansible Glossary

Return to Ansible, Glossaries, Ansible - Up and Running

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 state. Convergence is most closely associated with the CFEngine configuration management system. Convergence doesn’t really apply to Ansible, which puts servers into desired states after a single execution.

Complex arguments Arguments passed to modules that are of type list or dictionary.

Container A form of server virtualization where the virtualization is implemented at the operating system level, so that the virtual machine instance shares the same kernel as the host. Docker is the most well-known container technology.

Control machine The computer that you run Ansible on that is used to control the remote hosts.

Control socket A Unix domain socket that SSH clients will use to connect to a remote host when SSH multiplexing is enabled.

ControlPersist A synonym for SSH multiplexing.

Declarative A type of programming language where the programmer describes the desired output, not the procedure for how to compute the output. Ansible’s playbooks are declarative. SQL is another example of a declarative language. Contrast with procedural languages, such as Java and Python.

Deployment The process of bringing software up onto a live system.

DevOps IT buzzword that gained popularity in the mid-2010s.

Dry run See Check mode.

DSL Domain-specific language. In systems that use DSLs, the user interacts with the systems by writing text files in the domain-specific language and then runs those files through the system. DSLs are not as powerful as general-purpose programming language, but (if designed well) they are easier to read and write than general-purpose programming language. Ansible exposes a DSL that uses YAML syntax.

Dynamic inventory Source that provides Ansible with information about hosts and groups at playbook execution time.

EBS Elastic block store. On Amazon EC2, an EBS refers to a persistent disk that can be attached to instances.

Fact A variable that contains information about a specific host.

Facter A tool used by Puppet to retrieve information about a host. Ansible will invoke Facter when gathering facts about a host, if Facter is installed.

Glob A glob is a pattern used by Unix shells to match against filenames. For example, *.txt is a glob that would match all files that end in .txt.

Group A named collection of hosts.

Handler Similar to a task, except that handlers only execute in response to a task that is configured to notify the handler on change of state.

Host A remote server managed by Ansible.

IAM Identity and Access Management, a feature of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud that allows you to manage user and group permissions.

Idempotent An action is idempotent if executing the action multiple times has the same effect as executing it once.

Instance A virtual machine. The term is commonly used to refer to a virtual machine running inside an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud, such as Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2).

Inventory The list of hosts and groups

Lookups Code that executes on the control machine to obtain some configuration data needed by Ansible while a playbook is running.

Module Modules are Ansible scripts that perform one specific task. Examples include creating a user account, installing a package, or starting a service. Most Ansible modules are idempotent.

Ohai A tool used by Chef to retrieve information about a host. Ansible will invoke Ohai when gathering facts about a host, if Ohai is installed.

Orchestration Performing a series of tasks in a well-specified order on a collection of servers. Orchestration is often needed for performing deployments.

Pattern Ansible syntax for describing which hosts to run a play against.

Play Associates a set of hosts with a list of tasks to perform on that host.

Playbook An Ansible script. It specifies a list of plays and a collection of hosts to execute the plays against.

Registered variable A variable created by using the register clause in a task.

Role An Ansible mechanism for bundling together a collection of tasks, handlers, files, templates, and variables.

For example, an nginx role might contain tasks for installing the nginx package, generating the nginx configuration file, copying TLS certificate files, and starting the nginx service.

SSH multiplexing A feature of the OpenSSH SSH client that can reduce the time it takes to make an SSH connection when making multiple SSH connections to the same machine. Ansible uses SSH multiplexing by default to improve performance.

Task The unit of work in an Ansible play. A task specifies a module and its arguments, as well as an optional name and some additional optional parameters.

TLS Transport Layer Security, a protocol used to secure communications between web servers and browsers. TLS superseded an earlier protocol called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Many people refer to TLS incorrectly as SSL.

Transport The protocol and implementation Ansible uses to connect to the remote host. The default transport is SSH.

Vault A mechanism used by Ansible for encrypting sensitive data on disk. Typically used to safely store secret data in a version control system.

Vagrant A tool for managing virtual machines, intended for use by developers to create reproducible development environments.

Virtualenv A mechanism for installing Python packages into an environment that can be activated and deactivated. Enables a user to install Python packages without root access and without polluting the global Python package library on the machine.

VPC Virtual private cloud. A term used by Amazon EC2 to describe an isolated network you can create for your EC2 instances.

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ansible_glossary.txt · Last modified: 2022/03/24 22:13 by 127.0.0.1