How Industries are Solving Challenges Using Ansible.

💻What Is Ansible ?

Ansible is a configuration management tool written in Python using a declarative markup language to describe configurations. It is used to automate software configuration and deployment.

✍ Ansible Uses 3 ways for automation :

Ad-hoc commands, Playbooks and Inventories

• Ad-hoc commands: are command line “inline” commands that can run and return a result. These commands are associated with the ansible executable.
• Playbooks: are files that contain many plays and tasks that include multiple operations in YAML format. These are associated with the ansible-playbook executable.
• Inventories: Regardless of the way you use Ansible (ad-hoc, playbook), you will need a list of hosts that you want to manage. Inventory is an initialization file that contains information about the hosts you are managing.

✍ Advantages Of Using Ansible:

• Free: Ansible is an open-source tool.
• Very simple to set up and use: No special coding skills are necessary to use Ansible’s playbooks.
• 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.
• Idempotent: Ansible has idempotent power which makes it more powerful than others.

✍ Ansible Architecture :

♦️ Inventory :

A list of managed nodes. An inventory file is also sometimes called a “hostfile”. Your inventory can specify information like IP address for each managed node. An inventory can also organize managed nodes.

♦️ Control Node:

Any machine with Ansible installed is known as controller node. You can run Ansible commands and playbooks by invoking the ansible-playbook command from any control node. You can use any computer that has a Python installation as a control node - laptops, shared desktops, and servers can all run Ansible.

♦️ Managed Node:

The network devices (and/or servers) you manage with Ansible. Managed nodes are also sometimes called “hosts”. Ansible is not installed on managed nodes.

🔰 Case Study on Ansible :

In today’s IT environment enterprise applications can be complex scalable distributed, component-based, and often are mission-critical. We use automation tools like Ansible to solve these challenges for the Industries.

Ansible is the powerful tool of the DevOps world nowadays and the top class companies are using Ansible to automate things, as well as small startups, are working and growing with Ansible. Ansible is so easy to use for the customer. So It includes hundreds of modules to support a wide of IT integrations.

1. Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Ansible is used to define, deploy, and manage a wide variety of services. Most complicated AWS environments can be provisioned very easily using a playbook. The best feature is, you create a server-host connection and then run the playbook on just one system and provision multiple other systems with an option to scale up and scale down as per requirement.

Ansible has hundreds of modules supporting AWS and some of them include:

• Autoscaling groups
• CloudFormation
• CloudTrail
• CloudWatch
• DynamoDB
• ElastiCache
• Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)
• Identity Access Manager (IAM)
• Lambda
• Relational Database Service (RDS)
• Route53
• Security Groups
• Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
• And many more

As well as Ansible provides dynamic inventory and safe automation for AWS. That’s why Ansible is solving the many challenges as you have seen above.

2. Automate Microsoft Azure :

Chances are teams in your organization are already successfully deploying workloads in public cloud. As more new applications are built natively for the cloud, IT leaders are looking for ways to deliver a consistent customer experience and management strategy across cloud and on-premise applications. The good news — if your IT teams are already using Ansible to describe on-premise infrastructure and applications, then you can easily use these descriptions to automate the same workloads in Microsoft Azure.

Azure supports customers’ push to hybrid cloud in the areas of infrastructure, user identity and management. Using Ansible to automate these Azure services gives organizations the flexibility to run workloads where they best make sense.

Automate once, Deploy anywhere

Ansible’s library of Azure modules makes it easy to provision instances, networks, and complete Azure infrastructure whenever you need, and in any region you require. For example, the same simple Playbook language you use for application deployment and on-prem automation also provisions your Azure infrastructure, applying the correct configuration.

Once you use Ansible to define your application locally, you can repeatedly deploy and redeploy the application. Re-deploying it to a different infrastructure is as straightforward as defining your Azure environment and then applying your application’s Playbook. No more surprises. Because of its power and flexibility, Ansible ensures your Azure deployments work seamlessly in a hybrid cloud configuration as easily as you build a single system.

Windows, Linux, Services, Networks AND MORE

Azure hosts a lot more than just Windows, and thankfully Ansible automates it all. Ansible has been designed for cloud deployments from the beginning, and Ansible easily allows you to provision a variety of Azure cloud services. Whether you’re building a simple 3-tier application, or a complicated set of virtual private clouds, services, and applications, your Azure environments can be described in Ansible Playbooks, and then scaled out across regions.

Ansible has modules for many different Azure capabilities, including:

• Virtual Machines
• Virtual Networks
• Storage and Storage Accounts
• Resource Groups
• Security Groups
• Resource Manager Templated Deployments

Ansible also has hundreds and hundreds of additional modules that help you manage every aspect of your Linux, Windows, UNIX, network infrastructure, and applications — regardless of where they’re deployed.

Automating in Azure at Scale

As your Azure footprint and supporting teams grow, you will realize the need for controls to restrict users’ ability to modify certain environments. The answer is simple: Red Hat Ansible Tower gives you an enterprise framework for controlling, securing and managing Ansible automation with a UI and RESTful API.

Ansible Tower helps teams who use Ansible with an extensive set of role-based access controls that ensures users will only have access to the Azure resources (networks, systems, security groups, etc.) that are required for their job. Plus, Ansible Tower encrypts credentials such as Azure and SSH keys so that you can delegate simple automation jobs to junior employees without giving out the (literal) keys to the kingdom.

Conclusion

Red Hat Ansible helps organizations scale IT automation, manage complex deployments, and govern automation. It allows users to centralize and control their IT infrastructure with a visual dashboard, role-based access control, playbooks, and analytics to reduce operational complexity.

✨✨ Thank You!! ✨✨