How Industries are Solving Challenges Using Ansible.
What is Ansible?
Ansible is an Open-source, Software-Provisioning, Configuration Management, Application-Deployment Tool, Infrastructure as code.
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.
Why Ansible?
Ansible is easy to understand and accessible by every platform. It is using python and YAML language to write the commands.
Ansible is Agentless. That is, instead of having to install an agent on every system you want to manage. Ansible just requires that systems have Python (on Linux servers) or PowerShell (on Windows servers) and SSH.
“A tool that you could not use for six months, come back to, and still remember.”
Ansible Uses 3 ways for automation :
- By using Ad-hoc commands
- By using Playbooks
- By using Inventories
What Can Ansible Do?
The following tasks can be solved using Ansible:
- OS installation
- OS configuration
- creation and removal of users
- management of users’ passwords and keys
- creation and removal of virtual environments and containers
- deployment of code
- running scripts and tests, etc.
Ansible can perform more tasks beyond your imagination.
Industry Experience
NASA: INCREASING CLOUD EFFICIENCY WITH ANSIBLE AND ANSIBLE TOWER
Challenge faced:
> Increase efficiency
> Cloud migration
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. By the numbers:
- Updating nasa.gov went from over 1 hour to under 5 minutes
- Patching updates went from a multi-day process to 45 minutes
- Achieving near real-time RAM and disk monitoring (accomplished without agents)
- Provisioning OS Accounts across entire environment in under 10 minutes
- Baselining standard AMIs went from 1 hour of manual configuration to becoming an invisible and seamless background process
- Application stack set up from 1–2 hours to under 10 minutes per stack.
“Ansible Tower has allowed us to provide better operations and security to our clients. It has also increased our efficiency as a team.”
