Ansible Automation with Experts Mr.Sreejith Anujan and Mr.Arun Eapen
Recently , on 28dec 2020 , I had attended the great session organized by the Linux World on Industrial Application of Ansible in Automation using Ansible Tower.
I am so grateful to Vimal Daga Sir and Preeti Mam for organizing incredible session on industrial use cases of ansible and ansible tower for us . they had always make learning so exciting for us .
This session with two of the RedHat Dignitaries Mr.Sreejith Anujan (The Principal Instructor at Red Hat) and Mr.Arun Eapen (Director, APAC Service Delivery, GLS RedHat Asia Pacific) made learning technologies more exiting .
In the Session we had gone through many Industrial aspects of ansible and ansible tower -
- Automation Introduction, application and Use-cases.
- Tools for Automation .
- Ansible tower on top of CLI and GUI .
- Using Ansible tower on Web UI for easy accessibility.
- Using Ansible template in the ansible tower for the ansible job.
- Integration of its API with modern chats systems like Slack
- Storing of credentials of AWS, CISCO and also manually created credentials for the services which do not have credential and then using them in a secure environment.
- By concept of Orchestration it is very simple to manage the Workflow in Ansible.
- Challenges faced by Ansible which can be solved by the ansible tower like
- Ansible can suffer from single point of failure . but ansible tower uses clustered architecture which save it from SPOF.
- In Ansible we can not run 2 playbook in just one go but Using Ansible tower we can run the playbook workflow for the ansible job and can also see it visually on the Web UI .
DEMO & USES CASES -
1. There were powerful demos on the creation of a VPC on top AWS with instances running over it
2. Launching of Virtual Machine using workflow - We can mention which playbook will after the other and which playbook can run it some error occurs in the previous playbook.
Notification - for every playbook in the workflow we get notification that which playbook is running and permission is granted or not etc..
Integrating workflow with the chat application like Slack which give the transparency between the team members as at every stage of the workflow the message is send to the Slack channel group that what we had done on top of Ansible Tower and permission to be granted for the same. When permission is granted the workflow continues its work.
3. Connected the API and custom creation of credentials for the services which don't have this features , for securing our services like on Oracle Cloud.
4. For accessing Oracle Cloud we have to set up python virtual environment first and then using that Virtual Environment & Oracle API we can use and Configure Oracle Cloud.
Conclusion -
In this pandemic the Industrial are more moving towards digitalization and doing this job manually take lots of time and affords . Automating things can reduce the workload , learning tools like Ansible and Ansible tower has made automation easier .
This session added lot of meaning to our current learning , with interactive QnA . Got a chance to learn many new technical terms and got to see live of industry standard tools like Ansible Tower, RedHat VM's and their configuration online, ChatOps . orchestration meaning & answers to lot of new things. And last but not the least thanks to Vimal Sir , Preeti Mam and entire ARTH team for this awesome session.