📝 Day 6: Ansible Dynamic Inventory & Ansible Tower Explained with Real-World Examples 📅 #100DaysOfCloud #DevOpsWithSukaran
🚀 Aspiring Cloud & DevOps Engineer | AWS Free Tier User | Learning by Building
Hi, I’m Sukaran Mahajan — I am working as System Administrator and currently on a focused journey to become job-ready in AWS Cloud, DevOps, and Infrastructure automation. With a growing foundation in Linux, Git, Docker, and Terraform, I’m documenting everything I learn to help others and strengthen my understanding.
💡 Currently Learning: • AWS (EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, Lambda) • Docker, Terraform & Ansible • CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, Jenkins) • Kubernetes basics
🛠 Hands-on Projects: • Flask + Docker App Deployment • Terraform-based AWS Infrastructure • EC2 SSH automation & S3 access control
📝 I also write beginner-friendly technical blogs on Hashnode: 🔗 https://devopswithsukaran.hashnode.dev
💼 Open to internships, DevOps/cloud roles, and collaborative projects.
Let’s connect and grow in tech together! 🔗
🚀 What I Learned Today:
Today, I explored two powerful concepts in Ansible:
🔁 Dynamic Inventory
🏢 Ansible Tower
Let’s understand both with real-world examples!
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📦 What is Ansible Dynamic Inventory?
By default, Ansible uses a static inventory file (like hosts) to know where to connect. But what if your infrastructure keeps changing (like in AWS)? That’s where Dynamic Inventory helps!
✅ Real-World Example:
Imagine you're working in a company using AWS EC2. Every time a new server is launched or terminated, you’d need to manually update the static inventory. Tedious, right?
With Dynamic Inventory, you can connect Ansible to AWS using plugins or scripts, so it automatically fetches all your current EC2 instances in real time.
ansible-inventory -i aws_ec2.yaml --graph
This command lists all EC2 instances dynamically based on filters, tags, and regions.
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🏢 What is Ansible Tower?
Ansible Tower is a web-based UI and REST API for managing your Ansible projects at scale. It gives you features like:
Role-based access control
Real-time job monitoring
Notifications
Logging & auditing
✅ Real-World Example:
You're a DevOps engineer in a team of 10. Everyone needs to run playbooks, but not everyone is a command-line expert.
With Ansible Tower, your team members can:
Click a button to run a playbook
See the live output
Manage credentials safely
Schedule tasks (like backups or patching)
It’s like giving Ansible a dashboard, so even non-technical teams can interact with automation.
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🧠 Key Takeaways:
Use Dynamic Inventory when your infrastructure is dynamic (e.g., AWS, Azure).
Use Ansible Tower when working in teams or managing complex projects with UI and role-based access.
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📚 Tomorrow’s Plan (Day 7):
➡️ Hands-on Ansible project using Dynamic Inventory
➡️ Explore Host Variables and Group Variables in Ansible
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🔗 Follow my journey:
🐙 GitHub
📓 Hashnode Blog