How industries are solving their challenges using Ansible?
🤔What is Ansible?
Ansible is an open-source automation tool, or platform, used for IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, intraservice orchestration, and provisioning. Automation is crucial these days, with IT environments that are too complex and often need to scale too quickly for system administrators and developers to keep up if they had to do everything manually. Automation simplifies complex tasks, not just making developers’ jobs more manageable but allowing them to focus attention on other tasks that add value to an organization. In other words, it frees up time and increases efficiency. And Ansible, as noted above, is rapidly rising to the top in the world of automation tools.
Architecture of Ansible
Features of Ansible include:
● Ansible’s natural automation language allows sysadmins, developers, and IT managers to complete automation projects in hours, not weeks.
● Ansible uses SSH by default instead of requiring agents everywhere. Avoid extra open ports, improve security, eliminate “managing the management”, and reclaim CPU cycles.
● Ansible automates app deployment, configuration management, workflow orchestration, and even cloud provisioning all from one system.
Important Terms in Ansible :
⭕Ansible Playbooks :
Ordered lists of tasks, saved so we can run those tasks in that order repeatedly. Playbooks can include variables as well as tasks. Playbooks are written in YAML and are easy to read, write, share and understand.
⭕Inventory :
A list of managed nodes. An inventory file is also sometimes called a “hostfile”. Our inventory can specify information like IP address for each managed node. An inventory can also organize managed nodes.
⭕Control Node :
Any machine with Ansible installed is known as controller node. we can run Ansible commands and playbooks by invoking the ansible or ansible-playbook command from any control node. we can use any computer that has a Python installation as a control node - laptops, shared desktops, and servers can all run Ansible. However, we cannot use a Windows machine as a control node. we can have multiple control nodes.
⭕Managed Node:
The network devices (and/or servers) we manage with Ansible. Managed nodes are also sometimes called “hosts”. Ansible is not installed on managed nodes.
⭕Tasks: The units of action in Ansible. we can execute a single task once with an ad-hoc command. A task block defines a single procedure to be executed on the server like installing packages.
⭕Modules: These are little programs that act as building blocks encapsulating common tasks such as using yum to install packages or ping to test the connection to a remote host.
Ansible Workflow :
As the services increase, system admins will provision more servers to do configuration management. They need to install Ansible on the master node where they need to write the code into the Ansible playbook to describe the setup, installation process, and the configuration required for these servers.
The local machine connects to these servers (nodes) through an inventory using secured SSH connections.
Once these nodes are connected to the master server, then the node servers are analyzed and the playbook codes are pushed toward each of the servers so that these playbooks can configure the servers remotely, which leads to a consistent environment.
Ansible use-cases:
Ansible seamlessly unites workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in one easy-to-use and deploy platform.
● Provisioning
● Configuration management
● Application deployment
● Continuous delivery
● Security automation
● Orchestration
Advantages of Ansible :
● It is a free open-source application
● Agent-less no need for agent installation
● Python/yaml based
● Highly flexible and configuration management of systems
● Large number of ready to use modules for system management
● Simple and human readable
● Custom modules can be added if needed
● Self-documenting
Who uses Ansible?
1538 companies reportedly use Ansible in their tech stacks, including launchDarkly, Tokopedia, and Alibaba Travels.
💥Use of Ansible by Government Agencies:
Ansible and NASA
INTEGRATION PLATFORM : Cloud/AWS
USE CASE: Configuration Management
BUSINESS CHALLENGE FACED:
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.
💥Use of Ansible by Businesses
Ansible and HOOTSUITE
Hootsuite is a social media management system used by businesses and organizations. It allows the execution of social media campaigns on a variety of networks from a secure dashboard. Hootsuite is popular among Fortune 1000 companies.
CHALLENGE FACED : Lack of repeatability. This made automating Hootsuite’s infrastructure a challenge, and Hootsuite were also facing difficulties in application deployment.
SOLUTION : Ansible core
RESULT : This allowed Hootsuite to build servers from scratch and enabled repeatability. In the future, Hootsuite plans to implement an Ansible migration of its app deployment and possibly in ad hoc production server management.
💥Use of Ansible in Financial and Betting industry
Ansible and Amelco
Amelco is a UK-based company that develops software solutions for the betting industry and financial betting markets.
CHALLENGE FACED : The business was looking for a way to deploy its applications efficiently across its hundreds of different environments, and it also sought to limit downtime.
SOLUTION : Migration to an agentless automation framework.
RESULT : This reduced the complexities it faced with the deployment, operations and the upgrade of applications over a range of contrasting locations, while also using one simplified language.
In addition, by introducing Ansible and Ansible Tower, Amelco has successfully automated its application deployments. Other benefits include reduced complexity and continuous delivery, along with speed solution delivery.
💥Use of Ansible in Healthcare industry
HCA Healthcare Uses Innovative Data Platform To Save Life
HCA Healthcare, one of the largest healthcare service providers in the United States, uses data and technology to support modern healthcare. A cross-functional team of clinicians, data scientists, and technology professionals at HCA Healthcare used Red Hat solutions to create a real-time predictive analytics product system to more accurately and rapidly detect sepsis, a potentially life-threatening condition.
💥Use of Ansible by Cloud-based businesses
Ansible and NEC
INTEGRATION PLATFORM: Networking
BUSINESS CHALLENGE FACED BY THE COMPANY:
Recent customer trends towards cloud-based services have forced NEC to
quickly move to a hosted unified communications (UC) offer. NEC required a solution to increase the speed to market for new hosted UC customers, while utilizing the current team resources and reducing manual errors.
SOLUTION: NEC has a cloud network for its hosted voice solution and as new customers were being on-boarded, network engineers would enter numerous CLI commands to get them added to their SDN fabric. To speed up this process
and reduce manual processes, NEC migrated to using Ansible Tower and new Ansible modules specific to the NEC SDN solution.
RESULTS: Using Ansible and Ansible Tower to automate network builds, the NEC network engineering team is able to speed time to market, reduce errors, and add new auditing functionality.
So, referring with today’s demand of automation, it’s consistency, companies from all sectors are adopting easy-to-use tools that enable them to overcome complexities. The above success stories show how an Ansible migration can be the ideal solution for automating organizations’ modern technological challenges.
