Ansible and its use cases

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This Article is based on Use Cases and Case Study of Global Automation Leader that is Red Hat Ansible

 What is Ansible ?

Ansible is a Automation Tool that provides simple but powerful automation for cross-platform computer support. It is primarily intended for IT professionals, who use it for application deployment, updates on workstations and servers, cloud provisioning, configuration management, intra-service orchestration, and nearly anything a systems administrator does on a weekly or daily basis. Ansible doesn't depend on agent software and has no additional security infrastructure, so it's easy to deploy.

While Ansible may be at the forefront of automation, systems administration, and DevOps, it's also useful to everyday users. Ansible allows you to configure not just one computer, but potentially a whole network of computers at once, and using it requires no programming skills. Instructions written for Ansible are human-readable. Whether you're entirely new to computers or an expert, Ansible files are easy to understand.

 Why Ansible ?

Automation is an essential and strategic component of modernization and digital transformation. Modern, dynamic environments need a new type of management solution that can improve speed, scale and stability across the enterprise IT environment.

No matter the complexity of your environment or where you are on your IT modernization journey, an IT operations automation strategy can help you improve existing processes. With automation, you can save time, increase quality, improve employee satisfaction, and reduce costs throughout your organization.

Ansible Is...

1 ) Simple

Human readable automation

No special coding skills needed

Tasks executed in order

2 ) Powerful

App deployment

Configuration management

Workflow orchestration

3 ) Agentless

Agentless architecture

Uses OpenSSH and WinRM

No agents to exploit or update

 Ansible Architecture

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.

Being designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.

It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy - and most importantly, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allow you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.

Inventory

Inventory is lists of nodes or hosts having their IP addresses, databases, servers, etc. which are need to be managed.

API's

The Ansible API's works as the transport for the public or private cloud services.

Modules

Ansible connected the nodes and spread out the Ansible modules programs. Ansible executes the modules and removed after finished. These modules can reside on any machine; no database or servers are required here. You can work with the chose text editor or a terminal or version control system to keep track of the changes in the content.

Plugins

Plugins is a piece of code that expends the core functionality of Ansible. There are many useful plugins, and you also can write your own.

Playbooks

Playbooks consist of your written code, and they are written in YAML format, which describes the tasks and executes through the Ansible. Also, you can launch the tasks synchronously and asynchronously with playbooks. Playbooks contain the steps which the user wants to execute on a particular machine. And playbooks are run sequentially. Playbooks are the building blocks for all the use cases of Ansible.

Playbook Structure

Each playbook is a collection of one or more plays. Playbooks are structured by using Plays. There can be more than one play inside a playbook.

Networking

Ansible is used to automate different networks, and it uses the simple, secure, and powerful agentless automation framework for IT operations and development. It uses a type of data model which separated from the Ansible automation engine that spans the different hardware quite easily.

Ansible Use Cases In IT Automation

Ansible seamlessly unites workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in one easy-to-use and deploy platform.

Regardless of where you start with Ansible, you’ll find our simple, powerful and agentless automation platform has the capabilities to solve your most challenging problems.

Configuration Management

Ansible configurations are simple data descriptions of your infrastructure (both human-readable and machine-parsable) - ensuring everyone on your team will be able to understand the meaning of each configuration task. New team members will be able to quickly dive in and make an impact. Existing team members can get work done faster - freeing up cycles to attend to more critical and strategic work instead of configuration management.

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.

Continuous Delivery

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.

• The CI asks Ansible to run a playbook that deploys a staging environment with the application.
• When the stage tests pass, it might then be asked to run a production deployment.
• Ansible can check out your artifacts from version control on each machine, or pull artifacts from the CI server, or from a package mirror.

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.

Orchestration

Configurations alone don’t define your environment. You need to define how multiple configurations interact and ensure the disparate pieces can be managed as a whole. Out of complexity and chaos, Ansible brings order. But no one deploys a single service on a single machine any more. Today’s IT brings complex deployments and complex challenges. You’ve got to deal with clustered applications, multiple datacenters, public, private and hybrid clouds and applications with complex dependencies. You need a tool that can orchestrate your complex tasks simply. You need Ansible.

Ansible For Cloud Computing

Ansible’s library of cloud support modules makes it easy to provision instances, networks, and complete cloud infrastructure wherever you need. The same simple Playbook language you use for application deployment and on-prem virtualization automation also provisions your infrastructure, and applies the correct configuration to it. Ansible ensures your cloud deployments work seamlessly across public, private, or hybrid cloud as easily as you can build a single system.

Provisioning cloud infrastructures with Ansible is easy

Clouds are more than just servers. Regardless if your application environment just consists of servers, or servers, specific OS configurations, virtual private networks, subnets, and even load balancers - Ansible will ensure the infrastructure meets every need of your application each and every time.

Deploying your clouds with Ansible takes out the guesswork from the process. You don’t have to spend time educating entire teams on how to work with each cloud vendor in your environment, and you can trust that every deployment meets all of your policy each and every time.

Clouds are more than just servers

The modularity of Ansible’s code base allows Ansible to manage today’s infrastructure, but also rapidly adapt to new IT needs and requirements from the clouds of tomorrow. Ansible includes over 300 modules spanning hundreds of API endpoints in various public and private cloud technologies and vendors. From OpenStack to AWS to GCP and Azure, Ansible has the capabilities you need to effectively deploy and manage your infrastructure, including:

• Servers and operating
• Cloud-native routing and networking
• Virtual private networks
• Access policy and permissions
• Load balancers
• Autoscaling policy
• and more...

Now Lets See Ansible Support for One of The Cloud Computing Platform i.e Google Cloud Platform .

Ansible With Google Cloud Platform ??

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides scalable infrastructure and solutions to meet the needs of your organization. GCP offers on-demand instances, software-defined networking, storage and databases, and big data solutions -- and they're all available at your fingertips. GCP enables your applications to take advantage of Google's significant infrastructure, utilizing their best-of-breed technology and innovation, and only pay for what you need when you need it.

Ansible and Google Native Integration

The Ansible + GCP Integration gives you everything you need to manage your IT infrastructure. From provisioning instances and autoscaling, custom networks and load balancing, and even managing DNS and cloud storage, it’s all provided.

Ansible Automation Solutions For GCP Cloud :

Testing/Continuous Integration

• Use Ansible to launch instances in any GCP Zone, configure networking setups to accurately simulate real-world scenarios
• Deploy your code how you want: private disk images, startup scripts pointing to your own package repository and more -- all within your native Ansible Playbooks
• Tear-down instances when you're done: right after a test or after a review with the team and even keep a snapshot of the disk 

Production Deployment

• Use GCP Managed Instance Groups Playbook and auto scaling to ensure your application can meet the needs of its users
• Easily use Cross-Zone Load Balancing to have your application served by the closest-available zone
• Enable Service Accounts with specific access, enabling only those who need it to run your playbooks in production

Google is an Active Contributor to the Ansible Community

The Ansible open source community is a vibrant, fast-moving place that strives to get things done. Google thrives in open source, but also understands the reliability needs of its users to safely run their infrastructure. Google Engineering actively builds Ansible modules, contributes code and documentation, and helps users deliver their solutions with GCP.

I would like to thanks Mr .Vimal Daga for giving such Research Based Tasks which helps me to explore myself in Automation and several other industry based concepts open in this World .