How Industries are Solving Challenges Using Ansible.

What Is Ansible ? 🤔

Ansible is a software tool that provides simple but powerful automation for cross-platform computer support.

Ansible is a configuration management platform that automates storage, servers, and networking. When you use Ansible to configure these components, difficult manual tasks become repeatable and less vulnerable to error. 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.

How does Ansible work?

Ansible simplifies IT automation by capturing an array of IT resources and supporting multitier deployments from day 1. Ansible consolidates resources across multiple systems to manage them from a single platform rather than requiring management from one system at a time. Code, lifecycle, and changes can be managed through inventory, playbooks, and roles.

Ansible Architecture —

♦ Inventory :- Inventory is lists of nodes or hosts having their IP addresses, databases, servers, etc. which are need to be managed.

♦ API’s :- The Ansible API’s works as the transport for the public or private cloud services.

♦ Modules :- Ansible connected the nodes and spread out the Ansible modules programs. Ansible executes the modules and removed after finished. These modules can reside on any machine; no database or servers are required here. You can work with the chose text editor or a terminal or version control system to keep track of the changes in the content.

♦ Plugins :- Plugins is a piece of code that expends the core functionality of Ansible. There are many useful plugins, and you also can write your own.

♦ Playbooks :- Playbooks consist of your written code, and they are written in YAML format, which describes the tasks and executes through the Ansible. Also, you can launch the tasks synchronously and asynchronously with playbooks.

♦ Hosts :- In the Ansible architecture, hosts are the node systems, which are automated by Ansible, and any machine such as RedHat, Linux, Windows, etc.

♦ Networking :- Ansible is used to automate different networks, and it uses the simple, secure, and powerful agentless automation framework for IT operations and development. It uses a type of data model which separated from the Ansible automation engine that spans the different hardware quite easily.

♦ Cloud :- A cloud is a network of remote servers on which you can store, manage, and process the data. These servers are hosted on the internet and storing the data remotely rather than the local server. It just launches the resources and instances on the cloud, connect them to the servers, and you have good knowledge of operating your tasks remotely.

♦ CMDB :- CMDB is a type of repository which acts as a data warehouse for the IT installations.

Ansible Uses 3 ways for automation :

1. By using Ad-hoc commands
2. By using Playbooks
3. By using Inventories

Use cases of Ansible —

Now let’s take look on how big companies and industries like Microsoft Azure & AWS are solving challenges using ansible.

Ansible and 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. 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.

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.

Ansible and 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.

The Power of AWS Meets Ansible Simplicity

Using Ansible to automate your applications in AWS greatly increases the chances that your cloud initiative will be a success. The breadth of AWS capability enables IT organizations to dynamically provision entire workloads like never before. To harness this power, IT organizations must effectively answer:

• How can we control cloud deployments?
• How does Devops work in the cloud ?
• Will my deployments be secure?
• How can we migrate existing apps to the cloud?

Manage Cloud Like Cloud with Ansible —

When you deploy an application into AWS, you will soon realize that the cloud is much more than a collection of servers in someone else’s data center. You now have a fleet of services available to you to rapidly deploy and scale applications. However, if you continue to manage AWS like just a group of servers, you won’t see the full benefit of your migration to the cloud. Ansible automation can help you manage your AWS environment like a fleet of services instead of a collection of servers.

Benefits Of Ansible —

• No Agent. As long as the box can be ssh’d into and it has python, it can be configured with Ansible.
• Idempotent. Ansible’s whole architecture is structured around the concept of idempotency. The core idea here is that you only do things if they are needed and that things are repeatable without side effects. More than anything else this sold me over Puppet and Chef.
• Declarative Not Procedural. Other configuration tools tend to be procedural — do this and then do that and so on. Ansible works by you writing a description of the state of the machine that you want and then it takes steps to fulfill that description.
• Tiny Learning Curve. Roughly a week after starting to use Ansible, I was giving presentations on how to use it to a local Meetup. I’d contrast that heavily with Puppet and Chef which despite years of Ruby programming, I never felt comfortable enough to present to anyone.

📌 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 !🤝

Happy Learning…….