IMPORTANCE OF ANSIBLE IN INDUSTRY

Hola! Connections here comes a new research blog on Ansible which actually tells you about the introduction, its importance and the use cases of the industry, the help and easiness that Ansible is providing to the World.

Ansible- It is a powerful automation tool which is used by the many top companies in the Industry and has a huge demand of it in the industry. Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.

Setting it up is so easy and also very easy to use it. It can be easily integrated with almost all the technologies and services present in the current world and is also ready for the provisioning , configuration management and automation for upcoming technologies. It is to be installed in a computer known as Controller Node and will be managing and configuring 100s of computers at a time which are also known as Target Nodes.

It is agentless that means it is just need to be installed in the Controller Node and needed to setup an Inventory in the Controller Node itself which will be containing the information of login to the Target Nodes and the required configuration by the help of Playbook or Ad-hoc commands.

Features of Ansible

1. EFFICIENT ARCHITECTURE

Ansible works by connecting to your nodes and pushing out small programs, called “Ansible modules” to them. These programs are written to be resource models of the desired state of the system. Ansible then executes these modules (over SSH by default), and removes them when finished. Your library of modules can reside on any machine, and there are no servers, daemons, or databases required.

2. AUTOMATION

With Ansible, IT admins can begin automating away the drudgery from their daily tasks. Automation frees admins up to focus on efforts that help deliver more value to the business by speeding time to application delivery, and building on a culture of success. Ultimately, Ansible gives teams the one thing they can never get enough of: time. Allowing smart people to focus on smart things.

3. PROVISIONING

From traditional bare metal through to serverless or function-as-a-service, automating the provisioning of any infrastructure is the first step in automating the operational life cycle of your applications. Ansible can provision the latest cloud platforms, virtualized hosts and hypervisors, network devices and bare-metal servers. After bootstrapping, nodes can be connected to storage, added to a load balancer, security patched or any number of other operational tasks by separate teams.

4. CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

It’s likely you currently manage your systems with a collection of scripts and ad-hoc practices curated by a talented team of administrators. Or perhaps you’re using an automation framework that requires a bit too much of your time to maintain. Virtualization and cloud technology have increased the complexity and the number of systems to manage is only growing.

5. ORCHESTRATION

“Orchestration” is a commonly used word in IT automation. Unfortunately, it is often used to mean many completely different things, reducing the importance of understanding the key concepts. The idea that you have to deploy a database update prior to enabling new webserver code is an example of common ordering that can be called orchestration. This is basic, and Ansible can easily define these orders in a playbook but it can also go beyond this pattern to provide more advanced orchestration.

6. APPLICATION DEPLOYMENT

Ansible is the simplest way to deploy your applications. It gives you the power to deploy multi-tier applications reliably and consistently, all from one common framework. You can configure needed services as well as push application artifacts from one common system. Rather than writing custom code to automate your systems, your team writes simple task descriptions that even the newest team member can understand on first read saving not only up-front costs, but making it easier to react to change over time.

7. CONINOUS DELIVERY

Ansible provides true multi-tier, multi-step orchestration. Ansible’s push-based architecture allows very fine-grained control over operations, able to orchestrate configuration of servers in batches, all while working with load balancers, monitoring systems, and cloud or web services. Slicing thousands of servers into manageable groups and updating them 100 at a time is incredibly simple, and can be done in a half page of automation content.

8. SECURITY AUTOMATION

When you define your security policy in Ansible, scanning and remediation of site-wide security policy can be integrated into other automated processes and instead of being an afterthought, it’ll be integral in everything that is deployed. The need to respond to security attacks manually is daunting. With Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform you can automate and integrate different security solutions that can investigate and respond to threats across the enterprise in a coordinated, unified way using a curated collection of modules, roles and playbooks.

Integrations With Ansible

1. ANSIBLE WITH INFRASTRUCTURE

IBM data storage provides simple storage solutions that address modern data requirements and provides a solution to your hybrid multicloud strategy.With the speed, scale, and complexity of hybrid multicloud and even traditional on-prem environments, automation has become a top priority. IBM FlashSystem family for hybrid multicloud includes integration with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, allowing IT to create an Ansible Playbook that automates the tasks that are repeated across an organization in a consistent way– helping improve outcomes and reduce risk. It standardizes how IT and application owners interact together.

2. ANSIBLE WITH NETWORKS

As customers embrace the DevOps model to accelerate application deployment and achieve higher efficiency in operating their data centers, the infrastructure needs to change and respond faster than ever to business needs. These changes can help you achieve an agile operational model by improving on automation, innovation, and consistency.

The feature richness in Cisco Nexus NX-OS combined with the scaling and performance capabilities enable customers to build efficient data centers.

The Ansible integration with Cisco Nexus platforms enables customers to take advantage of programming and automating the infrastructure at scale with speed.

• Automates device bring up.
• Push network configurations to maintain consistency across the infrastructure.
• Optimizes network compliance and operation.

3. ANSIBLE WITH CONTAINERS

Newcomers to writing Kubernetes operators will need to learn a new language because Operators are usually written in Go by software developers that are highly familiar with Kubernetes. Ansible® is a first class citizen in the Operator SDK. Ansible-based Operators provide a lower barrier to entry, faster iterations, and the power of Ansible and its ecosystem.

Both Ansible and OpenShift have vibrant communities working to solve common problems. Combining Ansible and Kubernetes frees up application engineers to minimize the new skill sets required to maximize time to delivery.

The same tried and trusted Ansible tooling lets you Automate and Orchestrate your applications across both new and existing platforms allowing teams to transition without having to learn new skills. With the k8s module, an Ansible user can manage applications on Kubernetes, on existing IT or across both with one simple language.

4. ANSIBLE WITH CLOUD

Using Ansible to automate your applications in AWS greatly increases the chances that your cloud initiative will be a success. The breadth of AWS capability enables IT organizations to dynamically provision entire workloads like never before.

When you deploy an application into AWS, you will soon realize that the cloud is much more than a collection of servers in someone else’s data center. You now have a fleet of services available to you to rapidly deploy and scale applications. However, if you continue to manage AWS like just a group of servers, you won’t see the full benefit of your migration to the cloud. Ansible automation can help you manage your AWS environment like a fleet of services instead of a collection of servers.

5. ANSIBLE WITH DEVOPS TOOLS

The speed and quality of your application delivery is essential to your business. Splunk provides the leading operational intelligence platform that makes machine data accessible, usable, and valuable to everyone. Ansible is the IT automation engine that helps you end repetitive tasks, speed productivity and scale your efforts.

The machine data provided by Ansible Tower into the Splunk platform enable greater control and visibility. The Splunk platform will collect, analyze and act upon Ansible Tower data generated by your infrastructure and business applications delivery pipeline. Through analyzing this data, it becomes easier to identify correlation between deployments and hosts.

6. ANSIBLE WITH SECURITY

Organizations using DevOps and DevSecOps can enforce comprehensive security models in multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Fortinet develops and provides customers with the necessary DevOps tools to seamlessly integrate and manage their Fortinet Security Fabric solutions within their playbooks, and across DevOps deployment and operation activities.

Ansible is a lead automation and orchestration solution that organizations can implement and maintain security across these environments in a fast, simplified and effective way. Fortinet has developed several Ansible modules to support FortiGate FortiOS and FortiManager. This allows DevOps to embrace and apply security in the fast-paced world of multi-cloud, hybrid networks and application environments.

INDUSTRY USE CASES BY ANSIBLE

1. British Army speeds service delivery with Red Hat Ansible Tower

The British Army relies on IT to support its personnel deployed around the world. Its Information Application Services (IAS) Branch delivers software applications, hosting, and web services to the British Army. To overcome issues with unplanned downtime and support, IAS migrated its private cloud environment from Oracle to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With simplified, automated management through Red Hat Ansible, IAS can deploy changes faster and more efficiently. In addition, the new environment has reduced manual and other errors and eliminated unplanned downtime, helping improve the end user experience.

Benefits

• Simplified and automated management to improve consistency and reduce manual errors.
• Accelerated deployment of critical patches from three days to three hours and cut changed delivery time by 75%.
• Improved agility by enhancing DevOps approach used to deliver services to users.
• Gained access to expert support for troubleshooting any issues with new environment.

“Rather than bulk delivery ,we are able to deliver incrementally, and we no longer frustrate users with significant downtime during working hours.”

LT. COL. DORIAN SEABROOK

HEAD OF OPERATIONS,
INFORMATION APPLICATION
SERVICES (IAS) BRANCH,
BRITISH ARMY

2. Ansible Case Study NASA

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.

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.”

BY NASA

3. ANSIBLE Contributing to Microsoft

Microsoft needed to address increasing complexity across their corporate network infrastructure comprised of tens of thousands of endpoints that connects Microsoft locations worldwide.

“We have thousands of devices of various makes and models and software versions, so at times, it’s hard to keep up with all the different vendors and ways that we interact with those devices,” said Bart Dworak, Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft.

Their issues were compounded as code created by development and engineering teams was not version-controlled or peer-reviewed, leading to duplication and quality issues.

Using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and working with Red Hat Consulting, Microsoft created a standardized, centralized network automation environment that reduces routine, repeatable tasks and complexity. “Digital transformation is really changing the way that we think about how we solve problems,” said Dworak. “In the past, we had to manually do the same deployment again and again. With Ansible, we can create blueprints to deploy it multiple times. And every time we deploy, it’s exactly the same.”

“Teams are coming together to solve engineering problems in a shared environment of co-creation,”

Sonika Munde, Remote Access Services Engineer, Core Service Engineering, at Microsoft.

4. BMW Case Study

Worldwide, car manufacturers are focused on introducing automated vehicles, which require hundreds of millions of miles of driving data to prove their safety. To develop the driving algorithms for its automated vehicle initiatives, the BMW Group needed to access, analyze, and apply massive quantities of data — and update its driving applications with new algorithms as they are developed. The group wanted to create a high-performance, data-driven development platform as the IT foundation of its autonomous vehicle efforts.

SOLUTION

1. The BMW Group chose to work with DXC Technology to build a solution for its data and performance challenges.

2. To create a Kubernetes-based platform with robust automation capabilities, DXC Technology deployed DXC Robotic Drive, a managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) based on Red Hat OpenShift and other Red Hat technology.

3. This solution helps the BMW Group develop faster with scalable machine learning and big data processing capabilities.

4. The platform was configured and created in just 3 months.

“The big aim is really that in the next 3 to 5 years, we will have fully autonomous cars driving on the street. But only those companies that can master the data will be able to succeed in autonomous driving development.”

Rino Ariganello
Industry General Manager, Automotive, DXC Technology

HOPE YOU LEARNED AND ENJOYED A LOT!!