Industry Use Cases of Ansible

Hello, Here in the blog we'll talk something about Ansible and then will know how trivago is using Ansible, so let's get started.

Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes .Automation is the key to realizing the philosophy of DevOps and ensuring that it delivers. The implementation of automation technologies, techniques and processes improve the efficiency, reliability, and/or speed of many tasks that were previously performed by humans.

Now let’s understand what actually is Ansible & how it is used for configuration management.

What is Ansible ?

Ansible is an open-source IT automation engine, which can remove drudgery from your work life, and will also dramatically improve the scalability, consistency, and reliability of your IT environment. 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.

Ansible’s Features:

• Configuration Management — The enterprise hardware and software information is recorded and updated in detail, thus maintaining the consistency of the product performance.
• Application Deployment — The applications can be managed in Ansible from Development to Production when you define and manage the applications using Ansible.
• Orchestration — To manage as a whole and how the configurations interact.
• Security and Compliance — Wide security policy can be deployed across the infrastructure when the policy is defined in Ansible
• Cloud Provisioning — Helps to automate and manage the process

Ansible Case Study:

trivago is one of the world’s largest search and price comparison sites for accommodation. From lavish five-star hotels to intimate vacation rentals, the options they provide are endless. trivago works with many booking sites worldwide, including online travel agencies, as well as hotel chains and independent hotels.

Supporting local search engines simply wasn’t cost effective

For a global company like trivago, the digital marketing space can be extremely diverse. Choosing the best performing advertising platforms can be troublesome, but it’s also the key to success.

Advertising on Google, Bing and other large platforms was a great starting point, but the team quickly realised that they could expand their reach by utilizing smaller local search engines in addition to their global channels.

At first glance these platforms seemed out of reach, since the time and cost of implementation outweighed the potential performance. These channels would also count for a relatively small portion of their advertising efforts, so they needed to find a scalable solution in order to support them.

Finding a scalable process for data collection

When evaluating new advertising platforms, the first question for any data-driven business is: How will the data be collected, transformed and analyzed? This was no exception for trivago.

For the local search engines, they decided to import invoices and reports manually on a daily basis. This process was time consuming and prone to human errors. In addition, the marketing team was dependent on individual specialists for each country, which meant that if someone was absent, the data for that market wouldn't be collected and the reports would be delayed.

This was concerning for trivago and they quickly realised that they needed to find an automated solution, which also provided the depth and granularity they required. That’s when they found Funnel.

The Solution

Automating marketing data collection

Moments after getting started, trivago’s marketing team was able to connect their local search engine accounts to Funnel without internal developer assistance.

Since the majority platforms were already supported, they simply needed the login credentials in order to start the data flowing. For the channels that weren’t supported, trivago utilized Funnel’s development team to build custom integrations.

They also created simple rules to automatically normalize cost over their array of marketing platforms, using Funnel’s data transformation tools.

Thank You!!