How Ansible Solving Real Industry Use-Case

What is Ansible?

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 is agentless, temporarily connecting remotely via SSH or Windows Remote Management (allowing remote PowerShell execution) to do its tasks.

History Of Ansible

The Ansible tool was developed by Michael DeHaan, the author of the provisioning server application Cobbler and co-author of the Fedora Unified Network Controller (Func) framework for remote administration.

Ansible, Inc. (originally AnsibleWorks, Inc.) was the company set up to commercially support and sponsor Ansible. Red Hat acquired Ansible in October 2015.

Ansible is included as part of the Fedora distribution of Linux, owned by Red Hat, and is also available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Debian, Ubuntu, Scientific Linux, and Oracle Linux via Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), as well as for other operating systems.

Advantage of Using Ansible

• Very simple to set up and use: No special coding skills are necessary to use Ansible’s playbooks (more on playbooks later).
• Powerful: Ansible lets you model even highly complex IT workflows.
• Flexible: You can orchestrate the entire application environment no matter where it’s deployed. You can also customize it based on your needs.
• Agentless: You don’t need to install any other software or firewall ports on the client systems you want to automate. You also don’t have to set up a separate management structure.
• Efficient: Because you don’t need to install any extra software, there’s more room for application resources on your server.

Use-Case of Ansible

1. Configuration Management

Ansible is designed to be very simple, reliable, and consistent for configuration management. If you’re already in IT, you can get up and running with it very quickly. Ansible configurations are simple data descriptions of infrastructure and are both readable by humans and parsable by machine.

2. Application Deployment

Ansible lets you quickly and easily deploy multitier apps. You won’t need to write custom code to automate your systems; you list the tasks required to be done by writing a playbook, and Ansible will figure out how to get your systems to the state you want them to be in. In other words, you won’t have to configure the applications on every machine manually. When you run a playbook from your control machine, Ansible uses SSH to communicate with the remote hosts and run all the commands (tasks).

3. 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.

4. Security and Compliance

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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

Companies Using Ansible

Developers Using Ansible

Ansible Integrations

Docker, Amazon EC2, Kubernetes, New Relic, and Microsoft Azure are some of the popular tools that integrate with Ansible. Approximately 43 tools that integrate Ansible.

Configuration tool used in Market

As per 2018 & 2019 survey report

Ansible Adoption In Market

RALEIGH, N.C. — September 11, 2019 —

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that more than four million customer systems worldwide are now automated by Red Hat Ansible Automation. Customers, including Energy Market Company, Microsoft, Reserve Bank of New Zealand and Surescripts all use Red Hat Ansible Automation to automate and orchestrate their IT operations, helping to expand automation across IT stacks.

According to a blog post by Chris Gardner with Forrester Research, who was the author of The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure Automation Platforms, Q3 2019, “Infrastructure automation isn’t just on-premises or the cloud. It’s at the edge and everywhere in between.”1 Since its launch in 2013, Red Hat Ansible Automation has provided a single tool to help organizations automate across IT operations and development, including infrastructure, networks, cloud, security and beyond.

Let’s talk about some real industry use-case:-

1. Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers.

Challenge Face by Microsoft:-

Microsoft was looking for tools and platforms to empower its network engineers and make them more productive and able to focus on customer-facing value. With hundreds of engineers spread over more than 600 locations worldwide, Microsoft needed a solution that was easy to understand and simple to share across teams and geographic locations.

Solution

Microsoft deployed Red Hat Ansible Automation on Azure to transform the way they design, build, and deploy IT networks at scale

Impact

Through automating with Red Hat Ansible Automation, the company has saved around 3,000 work hours per year and greatly reduced downtime.

“Adopting Red Hat Ansible Automation has not only changed how our networks are managed, but also sparked a cultural transformation within our organization. By putting automation at the forefront of our strategy and not as an afterthought, we’ve been able to scale it in ways we did not know possible. Our engineers are now constantly looking for creative ways to solve their problems using Ansible Playbooks.”

Bart Dworak, software engineering manager, Infrastructure and Operations, Network, Microsoft

2.Energy Market Company (EMC)

EMC operates the wholesale market of the National Electricity Market of Singapore (NEMS), Asia’s first liberalized electricity market.

Challenge Face by EMC:-

The company was due for a server hardware and applications refresh for its core settlement and Market Rules engine system. However, the proprietary stack it was built on was aging and restricting innovation efforts to support upgraded NEMS applications as stipulated by market regulations.

Solution

To address this need, EMC migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP), Red Hat Process Automation Manager, and Red Hat Ansible Automation to facilitate continuous integration and continuous delivery through IT automation.

Impact

With Red Hat Ansible Automation , EMC has been able to automate the process of software integration, testing and deployment, allowing the company to build, test and release software more rapidly, frequently and reliably.

“Our operations are IT-intensive due to the sophisticated market model, the quantity of data, multiple communication links and the requirement to operate the market on a 24-hour basis every day. With Red Hat technologies, we have been able to digitally transform our infrastructure, preparing us for future growth in the market as well as enabling us to scale the NEMS System upwards and outwards easily as needed.”

Lau Chee Kiong, senior vice president, Technology, Energy Market Company