𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐒𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐬 𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞.

What is Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source automation platform. It is a simple automation language that can perfectly describe an IT application infrastructure in Ansible Playbooks. It is also an automation engine that runs Ansible Playbooks. Ansible can manage powerful automation tasks and can adapt to many different workflows and environments. At the same time, new users of Ansible can very quickly use it to become productive.

Ansible Is Simple

Ansible Playbooks provide human-readable automation. This means that playbooks are automation tools that are also easy for humans to read, comprehend, and change. No special coding skills are required to write to them. Playbooks execute tasks in order. The simplicity of playbook design makes them usable by every team, which allows people new to Ansible to get productive quickly.

Ansible Is Powerful

You can use Ansible to deploy applications, for configuration management, workflow automation, and network automation. Ansible can be used to orchestrate the entire application life cycle.

Ansible Is Agentless

Ansible is built around an agentless architecture. Typically, Ansible connects to the hosts it manages using OpenSSH or WinRM and runs tasks, often (but not always) by pushing out small programs called Ansible modules to those hosts. These programs are used to put the system in a specific desired state. Any modules that are pushed are removed when Ansible is finished with its tasks. You can start using Ansible almost immediately because no special agents need to be approved for use and then deployed to the managed hosts. Because there are no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, Ansible is more efficient and more secure than other alternatives.

The architecture of Ansible:

How Ansible Works?

There can be multiple remote machines that are handled by one control Node. So, for managing remote machines. Ansible is agentless so we don’t require any extra software on managed Node.

The Ansible management node is the controlling node, which controls the entire execution of the Playbook. It’s the node from which you are running the installation, and the inventory file provides the list of the host where the modules need to be run. The management node makes ssh connection, and then it executes the modules on the host machines and installs them to reach the desired state of the computer. It removes the modules once they are installed. So that’s how ansible works.

USER CASES

Configuration Management

Centralizing configuration file management and deployment is a common use case for Ansible, and it is how many power users are first introduced to the Ansible automation platform.

Application Deployment

When you define your application with Ansible and manage the deployment with Red Hat Ansible Tower, teams can effectively manage the entire application life cycle from development to production.

Provisioning

Applications have to be deployed or installed on systems. Ansible and Red Hat Ansible Tower can help streamline the process of provisioning systems, whether you are PXE booting and kickstarting bare-metal servers or virtual machines, or creating virtual machines or cloud instances from templates. Applications have to be deployed or installed on systems.

Continuous Delivery

Creating a CI/CD pipeline requires coordination and buy-in from numerous teams. You cannot do it without a simple automation platform that everyone in your organization can use. Ansible Playbooks keep your applications properly deployed (and managed) throughout their entire life cycle.

Security and Compliance

When your security policy is defined in Ansible Playbooks, scanning and remediation of sitewide security policies can be integrated into other automated processes. Instead of being an afterthought, it is an integral part of everything that is deployed.

Orchestration

Configurations alone do not define your environment. You need to define how multiple configurations interact, and ensure the disparate pieces can be managed as a whole.

Ansible Case Study: NASA

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

Result:

As a result of implementing the 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 the 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

Thank you for reading :)