How industries are solving challenges using Ansible. 🤔

What is Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source automation tool, or platform, used for IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and provisioning.

Ansible is an absolutely free and open source tool that is used for the above-mentioned purposes.

Why Ansible?

No one likes doing same task again and again, Ansible automates and simplifies repetitive, complex, and tedious operations.

Let’s look at a simple scenario…

Suppose you have a single system and you are the only user of your system, In this case a single script for any task or configuration will be enough and will work efficiently…

But if we have multiple systems and there are multiple users and admins, here a single bash script will not be enough and here is when ansible comes in picture, ansible can work as a bash shell and can configure our entire infrastructure in one go across many systems.

Plus, Ansible uses a very simple language called YAML in the form of Ansible playbooks that allows you to describe your automation task in a way that is as good as colloquial language.

Who uses ansible?

📍Componies:

“1525” companies reportedly use Ansible in their tech stacks, including LaunchDarkly, Tokopedia, and ViaVarejo.

📍Ansible integrations:

Docker, Amazon EC2, Kubernetes, New Relic, and Microsoft Azure are some of the popular tools that integrate with Ansible. Here’s a list of all “43” tools that integrate with Ansible.

How ansible is used?

Now we know what is ansible, why we use ansible and who uses ansible now the question is how do we use ansible….what are the challenges that we solve using ansible and how are big companies solving challenges using ansible…

Looking at Ansible customers by industry, we find that Computer Software (36%) and Information Technology and Services (9%) are the largest segments to 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. Our data for Ansible usage goes back as far as 3 years and 4 months.

📍Ansible-Based IT Automation

Ansible is an open source community project sponsored by Red Hat, it’s the simplest way to automate IT. Ansible is the only automation language that can be used across entire IT teams from systems and network administrators to developers and managers.

In the past, automation tools like Chef and Puppet have been widely used, but in the last few years Ansible has emerged as a very compelling tool with many advantages for administrators: Ansible is easy to get started with, has great playbooks and requires no agents on target host systems. Ansible automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs, freeing up the network and DevOps teams for more strategic work. The reason Ansible is so popular is simple: it makes life dramatically easier.

📍Let’s take a look at following use-case…

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.”

INTEGRATION: Cloud/AWS

USE CASES: Configuration Management

BUSINESS ISSUE: Increase efficiency, cloud migration

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: Leverage Ansible Tower to manage and schedule the cloud environment

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. By the numbers:

• 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

Conclusion:

Everyday, I’m in awe of what Ansible has grown to be. The incredible growth of the community and viral adoption of the technology has resulted in a content management challenge for many projects.

Ansible brings many capabilities to a growing number of management targets. Ansible is simple yet powerful. It is a great automation tool and does have great future.

I hope you found this blog helpful and it interested you towards ansible….your feedback is valuable, clap if you like it👏❤️