Ansible is a wonderful tool for many devops tasks, and can be used to automate Elasticsearch cluster management tasks.

Elasticsearch installation is very easy for a single node cluster - perhaps even a three node cluster - but installing by hand when the number of nodes increases further can become a daunting workload.

Elastic provide an Elasticsearch Ansible role that helps a lot with configuring a host, installing, copying configuration, restarting nodes, and other work required to build a node.

I have posted a tutorial on YouTube showing how to use the basic functionality of the role and install Elasticsearch on a fresh node using Ansible.

Ansible can be used to perform other Elasticsearch tasks such as:

• Updating mappings
• Making sure nodes have the correct roles
• Copying synonym files and scripts to all nodes
• Performing cluster upgrades and rolling restarts

Leave a like or comment on the video if you would like to see more.