ANSIBLE

ANSIBLE:

Ansible is the simplest way to automate apps and IT infrastructure.

Application Deployment + Configuration Management + Continuous Delivery.

Developer: Red Hat Software

5 primary reasons for the popularity of Ansible

1] Easy to begin

“It is very, very simple to set up and yet powerful,”reports networklore.com. “In short you can handle complex tasks with a tool which is easy to use.”Operating under the premise that automation shouldn’t be more complex than the tasks it’s replacing, Ansible is a simple automation language that is easy-to-learn, self-documenting and doesn’t require a grade-level computer science degree to read. Ansible can be used to update programs and configuration on hundreds of servers at once, but the process is the same whether you’re managing one computer or dozens.

2] Enterprise support from Red Hat

Like many other Red Hat products, Ansible is open source. However, it is supported with a subscription from Red Hat. The beauty of allowing people free access to technology is that open source communities become the driving source of innovation, Adam Clater, chief architect at Red Hat, explains. It also allows for comprehensiveness of applicability that provides flexibility so users can find creative ways to adapt the product for their needs.

3] Accelerated automation 

Ansible is agent less, and that means it can be set up in minutes using OpenSSH without installing anything on the servers. In order to be effective automation must be simple. People embrace technologies that are easy to understand and to adopt. In a blog post, Ansible General Manager Todd Barr writes that automation is about getting your life back. “Let’s let the computers do the tasks that are mundane and that we shouldn’t be spending time on … so that way we can focus on the things that are important to us,” Barr says.

4] Simplifying information technology

As an organization grows, one common challenge is people of different skill sets and experience need to use the same technology. If the only people who know how to operate everything are a small group of IT specialists, there will be problems.“One of the reasons Ansible is winning the day against other automation mechanisms is that it is significantly easier for an untrained operations-type person that is not a coder to be able to automate using Ansible,”explains Steven Carter, chief cloud architect for Red Hat’s public sector.

5] Information power multiplied

Ansible is one of the most popular open source automation projects on GitHub with an active and engaged community, reports Yahoo!Finance. New Ansible users can learn quickly and benefit from experienced Ansible users. That helps the automation process move even faster. There is also Ansible Galaxy, where Ansible users provide prepackage units of work called roles. Thousands of members are sharing thousands of these roles, which simplify tasks like provisioning infrastructure or deploying applications. The primary benefit of Ansible is it allows IT administrators to automate away the drudgery from their daily tasks. That frees them to focus on efforts that help deliver more value to the business by spending time on more important tasks. Ultimately, Ansible gives teams time to allow smart people to focus on smart things.

ANSIBLE TOWER

Ansible Tower Management:

Ansible architecture:

SUCCESS STORIES ON HOW COMPANIES USE ANSIBLE

HOOTSUITE-

Hootsuite is a social media management system used by businesses and organizations. It allows the execution of social media campaigns on a variety of networks from a secure dashboard. Hootsuite is popular among Fortune 1000 companies. The main challenge facing Hootsuite was the lack of repeatability. This made automating Hootsuite’s infrastructure a challenge and Hootsuite were also facing difficulties in application deployment. To resolve this, Hootsuite introduced Ansible core. This allowed Hootsuite to build servers from scratch and enabled repeatability. In the future, Hootsuite plans to implement an Ansible migration of its app deployment and possibly in ad hoc production server management.Since performing their Ansible migration, Hootsuite says ops and devs ‘feel safer’. Additionally, Ansible allows developers to repeatedly test server builds on a local level until the team can be sure they work. Hootsuite intends to use Ansible in many other ways, and as Beier Cai, Director of Technology, Hootsuite Media Inc., explains, “In the beginning I didn’t realize Ansible is good for orchestration as well but found it out quickly and I really loved it as it beats competitor’s right there.”

AMELCO;

Amelco is a UK-based company that develops software solutions for the betting industry and financial betting markets. The business was looking for a way to deploy its applications efficiently across its hundreds of different environments, and it also sought to limit downtime. To do this, Amelco performed an Ansible migration to an agentless automation framework. This reduced the complexities it faced with the deployment, operations and the upgrade of applications over a range of contrasting locations, while also using one simplified language. In addition, by introducing Ansible and Ansible Tower, Amelco has successfully automated its application deployments. Other benefits include reduced complexity and continuous delivery, along with speed solution delivery.

Further benefits include:

? “Faster time to deployment for its bespoke and modular client solutions, resulting in speedier time to market and higher customer satisfaction”.

? “A simplified and repeatable deployment process, leveraging true multi-tier, multi- step orchestration that minimized the complex dependencies of heterogeneous environments,”.

LIFESUM;

Based in Stockholm, Lifesum is a digital health platform that encourages users to lead a healthier, more balanced lifestyle. Lifesum has proved hugely successful throughout Europe, reaching over 6 million downloads so far. Lifesum’s platform uses a host of applications, in addition to a joint back end API, and it bases its infrastructure on AWS. Lifesum was looking for a simplified yet robust tool to allow configuration management, application deployment, and server provisioning. Prior to introducing Ansible, Lifesum had used another tool but found provisioning and managing different environments a challenge. Lifesum started their Ansible migration in 2014. It started implementing Ansible straight away and has used it in several major areas. First, Lifesum used Ansible playbooks “to automatically spin up virtual development machines with Vagrant”.In the case study, Michal Gasek, SYSOPS Engineer/DBA at Lifesum also notes that Lifesum’s goal, “[is] to ensure that everyone had exactly the same working environment as we deploy our applications regularly. Three months later all our environments, from developer’s laptops to production instances on Amazon, fully Ansible managed.” Gasek continues, “We use AWS Auto Scaling and pre-bake Amazon AMI images with Ansible provisioning playbooks. When EC2 instances are launched by Auto Scaling, Ansible, triggered by cloud-init, runs provisioning playbooks, once again ensuring up-to-date configuration changes are applied, and pulling the latest applications versions from repositories. Ansible has helped us to automate, significantly simplify and speed up the process of dynamic resources scaling”. Gasek adds that Ansible stood out because of its ‘power and simplicity’. Gasek also highlights how Ansible has enabled developers to concentrate on building ‘great product features’, rather than solving common problems like inconsistencies and misconfiguration.