“Industry Use Cases OF ANSIBLE…!!🎪”

Hello Friends,

Here in this article,i am going to introduce you one of the devops tool named ansible, and let you know about its industry use cases.

so lets start,

Automation????

Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes .Automation is the key to realizing the philosophy of DevOps and ensuring that it delivers.

The implementation of automation technologies, techniques and processes improve the efficiency, reliability, and/or speed of many tasks that were previously performed by humans.

Now let’s understand what actually is Ansible & how it is used for configuration management.

what is Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source IT automation engine, which can remove drudgery from your work life, and will also dramatically improve the scalability, consistency, and reliability of your IT environment. It is primarily intended for IT professionals, who use it for application deployment, updates on workstations and servers, cloud provisioning, configuration management, intra-service orchestration, and nearly anything a systems administrator does on a weekly or daily basis. Ansible doesn’t depend on agent software and has no additional security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy.

Because Ansible is all about automation, it requires instructions to accomplish each job. With everything written down in simple script form, it’s easy to do version control. The practical result of this is a major contribution to the “infrastructure as code” movement in IT: the idea that the maintenance of the server and client infrastructure can and should be treated the same as software development, with repositories of self-documenting, proven, and executable solutions capable of running an organization regardless of staff changes.

History of Ansible:

Here, are important landmarks from the history of ansible:

• In February 2012 the Ansible project began. It was first developed by Michael DeHaan, the creator of Cobbler and Func, Fedora Unified Network Controller.
• Initially called AnsibleWorks Inc, the company funding the ansible tool was acquired in 2015 by RedHat and later on, along with RedHat, moved under the umbrella of IBM.
• In the present, Ansible comes included in distributions like Fedora Linux, RHEL, Centos, and Oracle Linux.

Ansible’s Features:

• Configuration Management — The enterprise hardware and software information is recorded and updated in detail, thus maintaining the consistency of the product performance.
• Application Deployment — The applications can be managed in Ansible from Development to Production when you define and manage the applications using Ansible.
• Orchestration — To manage as a whole and how the configurations interact.
• Security and Compliance — Wide security policy can be deployed across the infrastructure when the policy is defined in Ansible
• Cloud Provisioning — Helps to automate and manage the process

Benefits of using Ansible:

1. Agentless –There are no agents or software deployed on the clients/servers to work with Ansible. The connection can be done through SSH or using Python.
2. English Like Language — To use the Ansible, configure, and deploy the infrastructure is very simple and it is English like the language used called YAML.
3. Modular — The Ansible uses modules to automate, configure, deploy, and orchestrate the IT Infrastructure. There are around 750 + modules built-in Ansible.
4. Efficient — There are no servers, daemons, or databases required for Ansible to work.
5. Features — Ansible comes with a whole lot of features and can be used to manage the Operating systems, IT Infrastructure, networks, servers, and services in very little time.
6. Secure and consistent — Since Ansible uses SSH and Python it is very secure and the operations are flawless.
7. Reliable — The Ansible Playbook can be used to write programs or modules and can be used to manage IT without any downside.
8. Performance- The Ansible’s performance is excellent and has very little latency.
9. Low Overhead — As it is agentless and does not require any servers, daemons, or databases it can provide a lot of space in the systems and has low overhead in terms of deployment.

Ansible Case Study: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

“Ansible Tower has allowed us to provide better operations and security to our clients. It has also increased our efficiency as a team.”

Business Challenge:

NASA needed to move roughly 65 applications from a traditional hardware-based data center to a cloud-based environment for better agility and cost savings. The rapid timeline resulted in many applications being migrated ‘as-is’ to a cloud environment. This created an environment spanning multiple virtual private clouds (VPCs) and AWS accounts that could not be easily managed. Even simple things, like ensuring every system administrator had access to every server, or simple patching, were extremely burdensome.

Solution:

Leverage Ansible Tower to manage and schedule the cloud environment.

Results:

As a result of implementing Ansible Tower, NASA is better equipped to manage its AWS environment. Tower allowed NASA to provide better operations and security to its clients. It has also increased efficiency as a team.

Thanks for reading the article.