Ansible Interview Questions

What is Ansible, and how does it differ from other configuration management tools?

Ansible is an open-source automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and more. Unlike other tools, Ansible operates agentlessly and relies on SSH for communication, making it lightweight and easy to use.

What are Ansible playbooks, and how do they work?

Ansible playbooks are YAML files that define a series of tasks to be executed on remote hosts. They facilitate the automation of complex tasks by allowing users to define configurations, orchestrate workflows, and manage infrastructure as code.

How do Ansible roles enhance playbook organization and reusability?

Ansible roles are a way to organize tasks, variables, and files into reusable units. They promote modularity and maintainability by encapsulating common configurations and functionalities, making playbooks more concise and easier to manage.

Ansible is a configuration management tool and an open-source product from Redhat company. Before moving into the details of Ansible, let’s explore the evolution of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The demand for an agile nature led to the rapid rise of the DevOps culture, aiming to accelerate the time-to-market for new services or features and stay ahead of competitors. Ansible has emerged as a leading configuration management and orchestration tool in the domain of DevOps, renowned for its simplicity, flexibility, and scalability. It’s widely adopted by top companies such as Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, and more, due to its robust features and seamless automation capabilities.

Here, we have curated a list of the Top 50 Ansible interview questions and answers. These questions span various aspects of Ansible, from fundamental concepts to advanced topics like playbook development, role creation, and Ansible Tower integration. Whether you are a beginner who just starting with Ansible or you are an experienced professional (5 or 10 years of experience) gearing up for an upcoming interview, this guide provides a valuable resource to enhance your understanding and confidently tackle Ansible-related questions in your upcoming Technical interview.

Initially, automation was done through scripting to replace the manual mode of workflow. However, scripting brought out challenges such as the requirement of writing different scripts on various platforms. For example, a script written for Linux wouldn’t support Windows, and separate scripts had to be provided for different Linux distributions like Red Hat, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. The imperative nature of scripting involved specifying detailed guidelines for performing the actions making it cumbersome.

To address these challenges, configuration management tools like Ansible, Puppet and Chef have emerged. Among these such as Ansible vs Puppet, and Ansible vs Chef, Ansible gained wide popularity due to its declarative nature and its use of a push mechanism with an agentless approach. Because of the declarative nature of Ansible, Users only need to specify where to act and what action to perform through its intelligence ansible determines how to execute the action using its inbuilt callback plugins for fetching information. This approach enhances efficiency and simplifies the management of different infrastructure environments. Refer to this Terraform vs Ansible to understand the difference between configuration and Infrastructure management. The below figure illustrates the Ansible Architecture.