How Industries are using Ansible.
What is 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, intra-service orchestration, 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.
Because Ansible is all about automation, it requires instructions to accomplish each job. With everything written down in simple script form, it’s easy to do version control. It enables Infrastructure As A Code (IAAC).
Ansible Architecture
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.
Being designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.
It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy — and most importantly, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allow you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.
Modules
Ansible works by connecting to your nodes and pushing out scripts called “Ansible Modules” to them. Most modules accept parameters that describe the desired state of the system. Ansible then executes these modules (over SSH by default) and removes them when finished. Your library of modules can reside on any machine, and there are no servers, daemons, or databases required.
Plugins
Plugins augment Ansible’s core functionality. While modules execute on the target system in separate processes (usually that means on a remote system), plugins execute on the control node within the /usr/bin/ansible process. Plugins offer options and extensions for the core features of Ansible - transforming data, logging output, connecting to inventory, and more.
Inventory
By default, Ansible represents the machines it manages in a file (INI, YAML, and so on) that puts all of your managed machines in groups of your own choosing.
To add new machines, there is no additional SSL signing server involved, so there’s never any hassle deciding why a particular machine didn’t get linked up due to obscure NTP or DNS issues.
Playbooks
Playbooks can finely orchestrate multiple slices of your infrastructure topology, with very detailed control over how many machines to tackle at a time. This is where Ansible starts to get most interesting.
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.
Hosts
In the Ansible architecture, hosts are the node systems, which are automated by Ansible, and any machine such as RedHat, Linux, Windows, etc.
Cloud
A cloud is a network of remote servers on which you can store, manage, and process data. These servers are hosted on the internet and storing the data remotely rather than the local server.
CMDB
It is a repository that acts as a data warehouse for IT installations. It holds data relating to a collection of IT assets (commonly referred to as configuration items (CI)), as well as describe relationships between such assets.
What Ansible Can Do?
- Configuration Management — The enterprise hardware and software information is recorded and updated in detail, thus maintaining the consistency of the product performance.
- Application Deployment — The applications can be managed in Ansible from Development to Production when you define and manage the applications using Ansible.
- Orchestration — To manage as a whole and how the configurations interact.
- Security and Compliance — Wide security policy can be deployed across the infrastructure when the policy is defined in Ansible
- Provisioning — Helps to automate and manage the process
Ansible for DevOps
Ansible is the most preferred DevOps tool for orchestration, automation, configuration, and managing the IT Infrastructure. The benefits of Ansible in DevOps is to respond and scale in pace with the demand. The following are the benefits of Ansible in DevOps,
- The feedback loop is accelerated at a faster rate
- The bugs are found sooner and do not wait till the end
- Risk due to lack of sufficient knowledge is mitigated
- The deployments are reliable
- The IT infrastructure is coordinated
- The deployments are faster
- Need for automation
- Version control and configuration management
- Orchestration of the IT Infrastructure.
Ansible’s advantages
As I learn there are at least three advantages that make Ansible our favourite automation tool.
- It is agentless. You do not need to install additional software on your server nodes. This helps keep the installation clean while ensuring that there are no conflicts with our software.
- Playbooks are easy to read and edit. They are mostly written in YAML, and this is a great advantage when compared to other solutions, such as Puppet.
- It is written in Python, a very popular programming language that is familiar to our engineers, making it easy to extend.
There is actually a 4th reason: it is open source. But this is a pretty common characteristic for this type of tool, so it is not a major differentiator.
When compared with similar tools, Ansible offers us one more great benefit. It is declarative and not procedural. This means that you write a description of the final state of the machine, and it takes all the necessary steps to fulfil that description. By working this way, playbooks can be applied several times and only necessary steps are applied, with no side effects.
Vodafone Idea Limited uses Ansible to improve IT infrastructure
Overview
To increase efficacy, conserve resources, and meet compliance standards, Vodafone Idea Limited chose to develop an automation solution with Red Hat. By consolidating and integrating its automation tools into a unified platform, Vodafone Idea Limited has saved 30% of costs year over year, reclaimed more than 1,000 working hours, and now solves automation use cases in minutes instead of hours.
Challenge:
Optimize IT infrastructure and efficiency
As India’s leading telecom operator providing connectivity to nearly 270 million mobile customers (as of December 2020), Vodafone Idea Limited needed to optimize its IT infrastructure. Teams’ manual daily operations resulted in low operational efficiency and multiple errors. Disconnects between automation tools caused security and compliance risks, inefficient use of resources, and financial penalties caused by frequent breaches in service-level agreements (SLAs).
Solution:
Use automation to standardize management platform
With standardization and automation, Vodafone Idea Limited improved the service management platform that offers business units IT visibility and control regardless of location or operating system. Using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform because of its open-source qualities and applicability, Vodafone Idea Limited consolidated and integrated its automation tools into a unified platform, dashboard, auditing, and reporting system. This solution is now being replicated with accounts across the globe.
Business Outcome:
Save costs and achieve more in less time
After implementing a standardized management solution, Vodafone Idea Limited’s teams now can solve automation use cases in minutes instead of hours. Approximately 75% of alerts are now automatically self-healed and resolved, and the automated provisioning of Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service is 99% faster. Standardization saved 30% of costs year over year, and automation reduced security and compliance risks, shortened the SLA commitment, and saved more than 1,000 working hours for employees.
Vodafone Idea has automated IT infrastructure and operations end to end by adopting Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Adopting Ansible Automation Platform has helped in reducing cost and improving operational efficiency with increased user productivity and faster go to market.
Jagbir Singh
Chief Technology Officer, Vodafone Idea Limited
Microsoft automates to simplify and scale with RedHat Ansible
OVERVIEW
To support its strategic mission, Microsoft set a goal of end-to-end digitization. This effort simplifies processes and experiences for end-users across all of its infrastructure teams managing services and applications. As part of this shift, the company is focused on building a culture of success, supported by automation technology. Using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and working closely with Red Hat Consulting, Microsoft created a standardized, centralized network automation environment that reduces routine, repeatable tasks and complexity.
Challenge:
Accommodate growth with new network approach
Microsoft needed to address increasing complexity across their corporate network infrastructure — comprised of tens of thousands of endpoints — that connects Microsoft locations worldwide. Their issues were compounded as code created by development and engineering teams was not version-controlled or peer-reviewed, leading to duplication and quality issues.
Solution:
Build a culture of modern development
Using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and working with Red Hat Consulting, Microsoft created a standardized, centralized network automation environment that reduces routine, repeatable tasks and complexity.
Results:
Establish a collaborative, creative development mindset
By focusing on people, processes, and technology, Microsoft has evolved its automation journey from manual scripting and changes to a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) approach supported by a centralized, service-based architecture.
Benefits
- Adopted centralized, phased automation to verify and reuse production code
- Established DevOps culture focused on learning new skills and collaborating across teams
- Saved thousands of work hours by mitigating network downtime and reducing production code defects
Digital transformation is really changing the way that we think about how we solve problems. In the past, we had to manually do the same deployment again and again. With Ansible, we can create blueprints to deploy it multiple times. And every time we deploy, it’s exactly the same.
BART DWORAK, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING MANAGER, MICROSOFT
CONCLUSION
With today’s demand for automation, consistency and the move towards the cloud, companies from all sectors are adopting easy-to-use tools that enable them to achieve these goals and overcome complexities. These three success stories show how an Ansible migration is the ideal solution for automating organizations’ modern technology challenges, while also performing an essential role in app deployment and improving responsiveness.
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