Automation Using Ansible
This blog is about the Automation using Ansible — Demo ( Practical Implementation) session which I attended on 28th December 2020.
The session was with two of the best experts from the industry Mr. Sreejith Anujan & Mr. Arun Eapen .
“ Mr. Sreejith Anujan”, The Principal Instructor at Red Hat. He Connected with RedHat for around 12+ years and he was a Speaker in DevConf.in 2018.
“Mr. Arun Eapen”, Director, APAC Service Delivery, GLS RedHat Asia Pacific .
In this session I learned about …
🔰 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, 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 Tower
Ansible Tower is the easy-to-use UI and dashboard and REST API for Ansible. Centralize your Ansible infrastructure from a modern UI, featuring role-based access control, job scheduling, and graphical inventory management. Tower’s REST API and CLI make it easy to embed Tower into existing tools and processes. Tower now includes real-time output of playbook runs, an all-new dashboard and expanded out-of-the-box cloud support.
✍ Features of Ansible Tower-
1. Ansible works on top of Controller node but if CN goes down than we cant run playbooks . This problem is solved by Ansible Tower , because Ansible works on cluster concept.
2. we can’t achieve workflow in ansible means run the playbook in the scheduled manner but this thing can be achieved by Ansible Tower
3. Notification system in Ansible- Tower is use to notify team members that server has been configured
4. Job template is exactly like ansible-playbook
5. Clustering is possible in Ansible Tower
6. Integration of Ansible with various cloud platforms can be possible g. Setting up the credentials in “Credentials” section in encryption manner for contacting to the respective service providers
Automation in the field of DevOps :
An enterprise capability for continuous delivery, deployment and monitoring of applications. Various processes and tools can automate DevOps to ensure fast feedback throughout the DevOps pipeline. Examples of opportunities to apply DevOps automation include developing, testing or deploying code; deploying a test infrastructure; or running tests.
Integrate Ansible Tower with Cloud & Notification based Applications :
1.) Ansible’s library of cloud support modules makes it easy to provision instances, networks, and complete cloud infrastructure wherever you need. The same simple Playbook language you use for application deployment and on-prem virtualization automation also provisions your infrastructure, and applies the correct configuration to it. Ansible ensures your cloud deployments work seamlessly across public, private, or hybrid cloud as easily as you can build a single system.
2.) When a job succeeds or fails, the error or success handler will pull a list of relevant notification templates using the Notification Hierarchy. It will then create a Notification object for each one containing relevant details about the job and then sends it to the destination (slack channel, sms numbers, etc).
