How industries are solving challenges using Ansible

?? What is Ansible?

Ansible is an open source software provisioning, Configuration Management and Deployment tool. Ansible is used for the multi-tier deployments.

Ansible, an open source community project sponsored by Red Hat, is the simplest way to automate IT. Ansible by Red Hat provides enterprise-ready solutions to automate your entire application lifecycle – from servers to clouds to containers and everything in between. Ansible Tower by Red Hat is a commercial offering that helps teams manage complex multi-tier deployments by adding control, knowledge, and delegation to Ansible-powered environments.

?? Characteristics of Ansible -

• Consistent - With Ansible one should be able to create consistent environments.
• Secure - Ansible does not deploy agents to nodes. Only OpenSSH and Python are required on the managed nodes.
• Reliable - The Ansible Playbook can be used to write programs or the modules.
• Agentless -There are no agents or software deployed on the clients/servers to work with Ansible.
• Efficient - There are no servers, daemons, or databases required for Ansible to work.
• Simple - It is very simple to use and is supported by YAML
• Modular - The Ansible uses modules to automate, configure, deploy, and orchestrate the IT Infrastructure. There are around 750 + modules built-in Ansible.

?? Ansible Use Cases :-

• Provisioning - Your apps have to live somewhere. If you’re PXE booting and kickstarting bare-metal servers or VMs, or creating virtual or cloud instances from templates, Ansible and Red Hat Ansible Tower help streamline the process.
• Configuration Management - Centralizing configuration file management and deployment is a common use case for Ansible, and it’s 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 Ansible Tower, teams are able to effectively manage the entire application lifecycle from development to production.

• Continuous Delivery - Creating a CI/CD pipeline requires buy-in from numerous teams. You can’t 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 lifecycle.
• 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.

?? Ansible Architecture

?? Industries are solving challenges using Ansible -

?? NASA -

INCREASING CLOUD EFFICIENCY WITH ANSIBLE AND ANSIBLE TOWER :-

“Ansible Tower has allowed us to provide better operations and security to our clients. It has also increased our efficiency as a team."

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation’s civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research. 

Problem Issue - Increase efficiency, cloud migration

Challenges :-

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 and Achievement :-

As a result of implementing 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.

? 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 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

?? Hoot Suite -

Hoot Suite is a social media management system for businesses and organizations to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard. More than 75% of Fortune 1000 companies now use HootSuite for social media management, social marketing, social customer service, and social selling. Customers include PepsiCo, Virgin, FOX, Sony Music, and WWF.

“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 competitors right there.

Challenges :-

Infrastructure is not scripted, repeatable or immutable. Rebuilding a server relies on limited documentation and mostly memory. Lack of repeatability makes automating our infrastructure and application deployment difficult.

Solution using Ansible :-

We mostly use Ansible core at this time. We currently are applying Ansible to all of our servers, so we can build any server from scratch and repeat this as many times as we want to. Our future plan is to use Ansible for app deployment, and maybe even ad hoc production server management.

Benefits :-

1. Ops and devs both feel safer, literally. Before they were always worried about ‘what if the server dies’. They aren’t worried about this anymore after all servers are properly ‘Ansiblized’.

2. With the help of Vagrant we can test server builds locally as many times as we want until it works, instead of testing it on EC2 cloud which is remote and always slow.

3. Ansible makes engineers more productive because lots of system libraries and packages are shared among different server types, and as we take advantage of Ansible’s ‘shared’ Playbook they don’t have to repeat the same lib/package install over and over again.

??THANKS