Ansible Use Cases & Case Study

Automation plays an important role in IT industry.

Automation is a broad term that can cover many areas of technology where human input is minimized.

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What is Ansible ?

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- Ansible is a Simple, Agentless IT Automation that anyone can use.

- Ansible is a universal language, unraveling the mystery of how work gets done.

- Turn tough tasks into repeatable playbooks. Roll out enterprise-wide protocols with the push of a button.

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows.

It includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. Ansible was written by Michael DeHaan and acquired by Red Hat in 2015. Ansible is Agentless, temporarily connecting remotely via SSH or Windows Remote Management to do its tasks.

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Why to Use Ansible & How it is Powerful ?

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- Ansible automates and simplifies repetitive, complex, and tedious operations.

- Everybody likes it because it brings huge time savings when we install packages or configure large numbers of servers.

- Its architecture is simple and effective.

- Working in IT, you're likely doing the same tasks over and over. What if you could solve problems once and then automate your solutions going forward? Ansible is here to help.

Using Ansible, we’ve been able to cut down certain processes from 17 hours to 3 minutes.

BRANDEN FAULLS

Head of Platform

- Red Hat Ansible Automation is an industry-leading enterprise automation platform trusted by over 1500 customers across multiple verticals and geographies, backed by one of the top ten open source communities worldwide.

Simple

• Human readable automation
• No special coding skills needed
• Tasks executed in order
• Get productive quickly

Powerful

• App deployment
• Configuration management
• Workflow orchestration
• Orchestrate the app lifecycle

Agentless

• Agentless architecture
• Uses OpenSSH and WinRM
• No agents to exploit or update
• Predictable, reliable and secure

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Companies using Ansible & Its Popularity :

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We have data on 8,781 companies that use Ansible. The companies using Ansible are most often found in United States and in the Computer Software industry. Ansible is most often used by companies with 50-200 employees and 10M-50M dollars in revenue.

Ansible has become a popular tool to use in recent years as it is able to manage a large number of servers by allowing users to create flexible, automated tasks that can be run from a centralized server and push changes out to remove hosts.

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How Ansible Work ?

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

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.

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Ansible Use Cases :

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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.

There are SIX Use Cases :

1. Provisioning,

2. Configuration Management,

3. Application Deployment,

4. Continuous Delivery,

5. Security Automation,

6. Orchestration.

1. Provisioning

Automate, manage and connect all stages of an application lifecycle:

Provisioning with Ansible allows you to seamlessly transition into configuration management, orchestration and application deployment using the same simple, human readable, automation language.

2. Configuration Management

Ansible Makes IT Automation Accessible:

Ansible is the simplest solution for configuration management available. It's designed to be minimal in nature, consistent, secure and highly reliable, with an extremely low learning curve for administrators, developers and IT managers.

Ansible requires nothing more than a password or SSH key in order to start managing systems and can start managing them without installing any agent software, avoiding the problem of "managing the management" common in many automation systems.

There's no more wondering why configuration management daemons are down, when to upgrade management agents, or when to patch security vulnerabilities in those agents.

3. Application Deployment

Deploying Apps Shouldn't Be So Hard:

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.

4. Continuous Delivery

Release early & often but keep it simple:

We come from a long history of building software the "release early, release often" way. If release often is an ideal, continuous application delivery may be nirvana.

To do it right, automation is key - but so is simplicity. Your team needs the tools that enable quick turnaround, requiring human intervention only when necessary. That's what Ansible does with one of the easiest paths to continuous delivery in the industry.

5. Security Automation

CHALLENGE:

How can we integrate IT security teams and the security solutions they use in a fast paced environment ?

SOLUTION:

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.

6. Orchestration

Complex Orchestration? Simple Solutions:

Deploying a single service on a single machine can be fairly simple and you have lots of solutions to choose from.

You can bake all your configuration into a virtual image, or you can run a configuration management tool (we recommend Ansible, of course).

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.

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Ansible Market Share and Competitors in Software Configuration Management

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We use the best indexing techniques combined with advanced data science to monitor the market share of over 12,500 technology products, including Software Configuration Management.

By scanning billions of public documents, we are able to collect deep insights on every company, with over 100 data fields per company at an average.

In the Software Configuration Management category, Ansible has a market share of about 4.0%. Other major and competing products in this category include:

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Case Study : Germany’s Federal Office for Agriculture & Food

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ABOUT BLE

Germany’s Federal Office for Agriculture and Food (Bundesanstalt für Landwirtschaft und Ern?hrung, or BLE) carries out tasks related to agriculture, fishery, forestry, and food.

It is the central service provider within the scope of the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, supporting national and international research projects in the areas of agriculture, food, and consumer protection.

GERMAN FEDERAL OFFICE SPEEDS I.T. MANAGEMENT BY 50% WITH RED HAT ANSIBLE TOWER

Germany’s Federal Office for Agriculture and Food, BLE, needed to make its infrastructure more efficient to meet ever-increasing demand for new specialized procedures.

To simplify management and save time with automation, the department migrated from Debian and SUSE Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, managed by Red Hat Satellite and automated with Red Hat Ansible Tower.

By streamlining configuration and provisioning processes with automation, BLE has reduced risk associated with manual errors, ensured compliance with IT security requirements, and improved its service delivery to internal users in other departments.

“Red Hat Ansible Tower is relatively simple compared to other tools and is very easy to understand.”

FABIAN SEELBACH I.T.

SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR, BLE

CHALLENGES :

GOVERNMENT CLOUD MANDATE REQUIRES EFFICIENT I.T. OPERATIONS

The country’s Federal Office for Agriculture and Food, Bundesanstalt für Landwirtschaft und Ern?hrung (BLE), works to strengthen sustainable agricultural, food, forestry, and fishery industries, as well as rural development.

BLE also provides administrative and IT services to its parent organization, the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, and other German authorities. However, the department was running its main infrastructure on Debian and SUSE Linux, which required its teams to Manually Configure Systems & Writing Scripts.

To improve its IT performance and processes, BLE sought to migrate to an operating system with more effective management tools and capabilities.

“We have nearly 1,000 systems to manage, and we were missing sufficient automation in our previous system, which is why we began looking for a new product,”

said Bastian Ehlenbeck,

Systems Administrator at BLE.

PROBLEM SOLVED :

AUTOMATED CONFIGURATION AND DEPLOYMENT IN A LINUX ENVIRONMENT

To meet these challenges, BLE decided to migrate to Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its core operating system, running in BLE’s datacenter. In addition, BLE uses Red Hat Satellite to manage deployment and installation of new virtual machines (VMs) and Red Hat Ansible Tower to automate many daily management tasks, such as configuration changes. 

“We looked at competing products, like Puppet and Chef, but we chose Ansible for two main reasons,” said Ehlenbeck.

"Firstly because of the quality of Red Hat’s support, and secondly because the Red Hat Ansible Tower solution works best with our existing Red Hat environment. It makes sense to have an easy-to-use automation tool that’s also from Red Hat, so any problems can be resolved more quickly. Every time we submitted a support ticket during the migration, Red Hat came back with a good answer and solved our issue.” 

When the migration is complete, BLE will have around 1,000 VMs running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, managed by Satellite and automated by Ansible Tower. These servers are used to run around 300 applications—mostly web applications for BLE, as well as its parent organization, the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, and its downstream business unit.

TIME SAVINGS LEAD TO FASTER COMPLIANCE AND DELIVERY

* EFFICIENT CONFIGURATION AND MANAGEMENT :-

BLE has now automated and simplified its manual configuration tasks and in-house scripts using Satellite and Ansible Tower.

“Ansible Tower is relatively simple compared to other tools and is very easy to understand,” said Fabian Seelbach, IT systems administrator at BLE.

We have already replaced 99% of our scripts with Ansible Tower, and we are moving towards managing all of our applications this way. “We save 50-60% of the time we previously spent on management and configuration.” 

* LOWER RISK, EASIER COMPLIANCE :-

Increased automation has also helped BLE reduce risk by minimizing the potential for configuration errors. Its infrastructure now runs in a smoother, more controlled manner, decreasing the number of daily maintenance requests.

* FASTER RESPONSE TO INTERNAL CUSTOMERS :-

Automation efforts supported by Satellite and Ansible Tower also help BLE’s IT infrastructure teams respond to requests from users in other departments faster.

“For example, we are able to install servers faster for our developers,” said Ehlenbeck.

“Alternatively, if they need a content management system (CMS) set up, we can do that work quicker because of automation.”

SUCCESS CREATES FOUNDATION FOR GOVERNMENT’S OPEN SOURCE FUTURE

Now that its core infrastructure is effectively managed and highly automated, BLE is successfully positioned to support future growth.

“Our goal is that our applications can be used by many authorities, centrally operated in a federal computing center,” said Ehlenbeck. 

“With Red Hat, we now have automation and support for the key parts of our infrastructure,” said Ehlenbeck.

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So Thank You Everyone That's All From My Side I Hope You May Have Enhanced Your Knowledge Regarding Ansible & I Hope You Have Enjoyed A Lot While Reading These Article.

Also I Would Like to Thanks #Vimal Daga Sir for Giving such Wonderful Task & Mentoring Us.

Thank You Everyone!!!

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