What is Ansible and how do you use it for configuration management?

Quick answer: Ansible is a configuration management tool — it excels at keeping existing servers' software and configuration up to date (install/remove packages, update config files, run routine housekeeping), stored as playbooks in git so it counts as infrastructure as code. For provisioning the underlying cloud infrastructure itself, Terraform is generally the better fit; the two are often used together.

Ansible, yes, it's a tool for configuration management. It can be saved into git repos, so it counts as infrastructure as code. It can also manage infrastructure like AWS, but I would recommend using Terraform for that purpose — Ansible really excels at looking at the configuration and keeping everything up to date on your servers. It can install, remove software, update configuration, and other housekeeping tasks.

What is Ansible made up of?

• Inventory — that's your servers.
• Playbooks — a link between the servers and what you want them to do.
• Roles — a group of tasks.
• Tasks — what actually configure the server.
• Variables — because we want to keep the variables separate to the code.
• Groups — where we can group the hosts together.