Ansible Interview Questions and Answers

Ansible is a widely-used open source IT configuration management and deployment tool. This orchestration tool helps to provide maximum productivity gains for the majority of automation platforms also it helps in the setup and management of infrastructure and associated applications. Ansible is utilized to manage IT infrastructure and to deploy software applications directly to remote nodes.

Being an open-source deployment tool Ansible offers communication with configured lines initiating from the command line with the help of Ansible command. This phenomenon allows IT professionals to automate the configuration using any ansible-playbook command and in order to create any base directory structure, one has to use tool bundled with Ansible.

This structure is known as Ansible-galaxy. This is one of the most commonly asked Ansible interview questions.

Ansible offers a number of benefits, like-

• No agent required: For the setting of the Ansible deployment tool, no specific agent is required. Also if Box has a tendency to support SSH and Python then there is no need to set up Ansible.
• Idempotent: Ansible is structured in such a way to follow the overall concept of idempotency. Its fundamental idea is to add only those things which are actually "required" and these things can be repeated.
• Declarative but not procedural: The majority of configuration tools follow through a complicated process of doing one thing then next, then next and so on. Ansible as an efficient configuration and deployment tool allows the IT professional to write the description of the state of the machine simply and mention the requirements and right after the description, it starts taking steps towards it.

• It has low overheads and can be executed with minimal resource utilization.
• The only dependency of Ansible is python.
• All of its tasks are written in YAML syntax.
• Ansible is extremely easy to learn and understand.

Using two different methods, it is easy to install Ansible.

These steps follow through the brief mentioned below-

• Install it from a distribution package repository.
• Build from source code.
• Install Ansible using python package management tools for example pip.

Let us learn about the procedures in detail:

1. It can be installed using Linux's best installation architecture.

• In order to serve the purpose first add the repository to APT by using the command on terminal 'sudo apt-add-repository -y PPA: Ansible/Ansible'
• Now update the repository by using the command 'sudo apt-get update'
• Using the command 'sudo apt-get install -y Ansible' Ansible can be installed

2. with the help of Python installer:

• First of all, install python on your local machine
• Using the command 'sudo pip install Ansible' on terminal install Ansible.
• This can be updated with the command 'sudo pip install --upgrade Ansible'.

As soon as sensible that's installed on your system you can verify it with the help of command 'Ansible --version. This Ansible interview question has proved to be a tiebreaker in many conditions.

The major constituent of Ansible are nodes and controlling machines where Ansible is installed on controlling machine and nodes are used to manage these controlling machines with the help of SSH offering no downtime. With the help of inventory files, the controlling machine specifies the location of nodes.

Ansible also deploys modules to nodes with the help of SSH protocol and these modules get stored temporarily in remote nodes. These models can also communicate with the Ansible machines with the help of the JSON connection over the standard output.

There is a feature named Vault in Ansible which helps IT professionals, to keep their sensitive data in encrypted files. The passwords or keys are secured extensively rather than in the form of plaintexts in Playbooks. A command-line tool named Ansible- vault tab is present in Ansible which is used to edit the files. Few common flexes are also used along with these command-line tools as ask-vault-pass or vault-password-file. In order to process the playbook containing vault encrypted files, you have to pass any of the two flags.

By default, Ansible has a file on /etc/Ansible/hosts containing a hostname or IP address of the targeted system. The inventory file can be specified with the help of -I option on the command line. Ansible actively selects the segment of hosts to work from this inventory file. This file can be in YAML or INI format. In the inventory file host and group, variables are defined and it is easy to assign these variables to host for later utilization.

Note: This is one of the frequently asked Ansible interview questions.

Ansible tower provided by Red Hat or Ansible, both are in the N2 and automation platform which has the capability to provide a number of features.

Its complete functionality includes-

• Provision of components
• Deploying the applications
• Orchestrating workflow
• Managing its systems and infrastructure
• Configuration of systems
• Networking and other applications

Ansible playbook is the actual building block supporting all of the use cases of the Ansible tool. The variety in YAML tags are divided into four major types which are known as-

• Declaration
• Vars
• Tasks
• Handlers

Ansible playbooks are also a combined set of commands that has the capability to perform huge tasks and they are also written in YAML file format.

The web-based solution which makes Ansible an easy task for the IT professionals or teams associated with any project an easy task to operate is Ansible tower. Ansible tower is designed to act as half for the automation tasks and it is free for its uses up to 10 nodes.

This Ansible interview question comes under the advanced segment.

Ansible modules are idempotent which means it professionals can perform the task of RESTful service standpoint for idempotent operations. In this condition various identical requests became a single request end-user can create its own modules in Ansible.

There are two types of models present in Ansible-

• Core modules: This type of module is managed by the Ansible team and they always ship with its software. The highest priority is given to this module as compared to other modules.
• Extras modules: Currently these models are bundled with Ansible but maybe they will be available separately in the future. Mostly they are managed and organized by the Ansible community.

Ansible fact is a way for tools to get data and complete information about a host and store them in the variables for their easy access. This information is stored in predefined variables that are available for use in the playbook. To generate the facts and simple techniques the setup module is as-

$ Ansible- m setup hostname

As soon as the statement gets executed it will print out a list of a dictionary of the facts which are available for a particular host. This is the way to access the list of available Ansible_variables. These facts can be seen as-

$ Ansible all- m setup

If a user wants to extract any particular part of the available information then the "set up" model can be used where an option is available to filter out the output and the facts which are required can behold.

The Ansible files can be made reusable in following ways-

• Include
• Role
• Import

In order to break or create the number of smaller files of any huge playbook imports and includes are used. Rolls are used to organize and manage multiple tasks following a package including plugin, variables, handlers and other modules. By using Ansible galaxy they can also be uploaded and shared directly.

• Playbook: playbook is referred to as a code file that is written in YAML format. It contains the essential tasks requires to be implemented.
• Task: Task represents a single procedure that is required to be executed.
• Play: Play refers to a task is executed from beginning to end or execution of a playbook.