EDIT : This blog post has been modified thanks to Douglas suggestions, in the comment section.

I recently took the plunge to learn and use Ansible. I read many interesting blog posts on how Ansible can simplify DBA life from a lot of people in the community. But I felt I needed a simple use case to finally get started and become familiar with it.

How is Ansible relevant to my DBA job?

To overly simplify the concept of Ansible, let’s say it allows to SSH from any machine (control node) to a group of servers (managed nodes) to run the same commands, as long as Ansible is installed on the control node. The magic part is that you don’t have to deploy any agent on the the managed nodes. I will not cover the functioning of Ansible in this blog post, the official documentation is a must-read.

I recently had to deploy Autonomous Health Framework on a group of new servers : finally I got the simple use-case I was waiting for.

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