What is Ansible ?
Ansible is a software 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.
Because Ansible is all about automation, it requires instructions to accomplish each job. With everything written down in simple script form, it's easy to do version control. The practical result of this is a major contribution to the "infrastructure as code" movement in IT: the idea that the maintenance of server and client infrastructure can and should be treated the same as software development, with repositories of self-documenting, proven, and executable solutions capable of running an organization regardless of staff changes.
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.
Binck (BinckBank) Ansible Case Study
“Ansible is quite fun to use right away. As soon as you write five lines of code it works. With SSH and Ansible I can send commands to 500 servers without having even used the servers before.” – Mark Maas, Unix/Linux Systems Administrator Binck Bank
About BinckBank:
BinckBank is an online bank for investors based in Amsterdam and is ranked among the top five investment banks in Europe and the market leader in the Netherlands and Belgium. BinckBank has more than 760,000 accounts with offices in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Italy and 590 employees.
What is your business challenge?
Our problem was complexity in the datacenter. We wanted automation but we also wanted simplicity and to not have to send people to training in order to use the product. I’ve been dabbling with Ansible since before version 1.0. I remember showing my staff how we can roll out new users—20, 30 at a time within 10 minutes. They could understand what I was creating as a line of text—it is so easy to read it can be considered its own documentation.
How is BinckBank using Ansible?
We have 600 UNIX servers in house. We have a lot of specialty environments that we need to create while at the same time managing our production environment. Ansible is quite fun to use right away—as soon as you write five lines of code it works. SSH makes it all so easy because it is text-based, making it really powerful when combined with Ansible. With SSH and Ansible I can send commands to 500 servers without having even used the servers before.
We are experimenting with monitoring networks. We use NAGIOS. NAGIOS is an example of a technology doing something extremely well—monitoring networks—while leaving the fixing to Ansible. NAGIOS can see a server is busy in the middle of the night, send a message to Cobbler to create a few more servers on a virtual platform and then start Ansible to make servers into web servers, enhancing the capability of your website with more servers. You can literally wake up to more sales this way. Ansible is the glue that connects monitoring, scripting and server installation. Ansible glues it all together and now you have a self-healing network. You can link to NAGIOS so Ansible can check way more than what you can script. The whole fun of Unix is that the output of one command is the input for another.
What are your results with Ansible?
From an IT standpoint I can show other people that if we install a production and testing environment with Ansible it will be done right. Unless you do the work by hand there is always the question—did you install correctly? With Ansible you can be assured without a shadow of a doubt that an installation is correct. Ansible makes it easier to trust my own work and my servers’ work. Ansible gives me peace of mind on a much bigger scale.
What are your plans to grow your Ansible usage moving forward?
We are completely focused on automating as much as possible in our datacenter and going beyond Unix to create more stuff for more people to do be able to do more. Now it is just managing and band-aids but we will take that part of out of the equation.